Simon Callow at Jamie Oliver's school of broken dreams

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10 April 2012

I had, I thought, a pretty rotten education. My longest span of schooling was at the London Oratory Grammar School in Chelsea, where the priorities were piety, discipline and exam results. The idea that there might be any other purpose to learning was not considered. Except, that is, by a couple of renegade teachers, who threw open windows onto possibilities of life of which we had not been aware.

Nowadays, of course, it would seem - this utterly undistinguished school - like an educational Garden of Eden. Everybody, without exception, could read, write and do sums; classes proceeded calmly and quietly; uniforms, neatly turned out, were worn with minor variations; teachers were obeyed without question. The worst crime might be a playground skirmish or lad caught smoking a cig in the bogs (for either of which a flogging would be the standard punishment). A reasonable percentage of students passed on to higher education every year.

The basic premise of Dream School was that many of the kids who left school without minimum qualifications did so because they had never met an inspiring teacher and I thought, well, perhaps. I have never taught anyone, except for actors in workshops, where the assumption is that they are there because they want to be, but I was very confident about my subject: Shakespeare.

I had been working for months on my one-man play The Man from Stratford, and was certain that there was something for everyone in the plays. I didn't want any props, any educational aids; there would be no need for field visits. The plays alone would grab them by the throat.
I had great confidence in the kids: if they weren't condescended to, they would respond to this most human and intelligible of writers. My job was to convince them that the plays of William Shakespeare had a contribution to make to their lives. I would find each of them a character from the plays with which they would identify, and a speech which they would learn and present: they would own this speech, and make out its case - sell it, sell Shakespeare to each other.

On Day One all my ideas were shot down in flames.

First stop was the staff room in the school: in it I found the historian David Starkey, and Jazzy-B, who was teaching music; then Mary Beard, who had the heroic, the inconceivable, task of teaching them Latin. The atmosphere was brittle with feigned confidence. Excited reports were coming from downstairs, where Jamie's introductory session was underway: one seventeen-year-old had fainted because she was missing her baby so much and there had been an outburst of fighting between another girl and a boy.

Then someone said to me, 'You're on, Simon." I strode down the corridor so fast that the crew to run to keep up with me. I just leaped in.

The room was exploding with energy. These kids from all over the country, from different social backgrounds, who had just met each other for the first time, had already formed alliances and enmities, and were engaged in the process of testing the dynamics of the group, an activity which it became clear was their central obsession. Walking into it was like entering a cage of chimpanzees. I somehow got some sort of silence simply by shouting louder than they did.

This was just brute force; they hadn't the remotest idea who I was.

I said: "So. William Shakespeare. What do you know about him?" "Dead," someone shouted. "OK," I said, "what's the story of Romeo and Juliet?" And Conor, a chubby Cockney bruiser of a lad, nonchalantly and brilliantly summarised the plot in three short sentences, better than I could have done it, better than any academic could have done it. I began to suspect that they knew rather more about Shakespeare than they were letting on.

I asked each of them to tell me who they'd like to be. Most of them wanted to be rich and famous: Jamal, a slightly exotic black boy, wanted to be Katie Price ("she got such a nice life"); almost everyone else wanted to be Angelina Jolie or Brad Pitt. Harlem wanted to be her own grandmother, because she worked so hard and had such self-respect, and Angelique, dreamy-eyed, with a voice of startling penetrability, wanted to be "Lady Macbeff, because she a psychotic bipolar bitch," but she also fancied being Juliet "because she so sweet."

Nana Kwame, once he could be weaned away from his laptop - and virtually everyone in the room had a laptop or a mobile phone on which they texted continuously or even openly answered - named Tupac (Shakur, the American rap artist shot dead in 1996, having sold 75m albums) and I said, "uh-huh, rich and famous," and he furiously rebutted me. I knew nothing about the rapper's history, about his attempts to wean his people off gang warfare, about his championship of Shakespeare; Nana Kwame put me sharply right. And closed his laptop. He was now, I took it, part of the class.

I plunged on. I raised the question of metaphor and simile. We had a surprisingly vigorous discussion about this, and then, finally, I got Angelique to volunteer to read the sonnet "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day," which she did with quiet determination and in silence. The class ended in reasonably good spirits. Jamie had sat in on it, and said, "Well, you did better than I did. I couldn't get them to listen at all.

I have this idea about myself," he said, 'that I'm quite an interesting person, but maybe not."

At which point, Jourdelle, a large black lad with a sprained ankle lumbered up on his crutches.

"Sir," he said, "you know about similes and metaphors? Well, there's antonyms and synonyms, too, in't there?" "Indeed," I said, 'welcome to the class, Jourdelle."

We next met when they came to see my show a few days later. They didn't arrived till the interval, but they were very attentive, and afterwards they came onstage in high spirits, playing with the props, looking at the lights, at the sound equipment, amazed that I'd remembered 'all them words'. What I didn't know was that Nana Kwame had been texting during the show, a member of the audience had told him to stop, and Nana Kwame had declined. This provoked the audience member to draw attention to the colour of his skin and suggest that he leave the theatre. This altercation ended with Nana Kwame being chased down the High Street. He effortlessly outran them and swung back to the theatre and came backstage to tell me (and the camera crew) all about it.

We talked about all of this in the next class - generally people like to be able concentrate in the theatre, I said, but that this had not been the case in the Elizabethan theatre, where people talked all the time, and sometimes threw things at the stage when the mood took them. "What did he (Shakespeare) die of?" someone asked.

"Syphilis," said Conor. "It's one of the theories," I said. "What's syphilis?" "A sexually transmitted disease." "Wow. Shakespeare died of an STD!" His status soared.

They wanted to know more about him. I told them.

They listened, really listened. This was old-fashioned, hardcore teaching. I then tried an exercise, having each person say one line of Mercutio's famous Queen Mab speech from Romeo and Juliet. It was a bad idea: I lost them. Small scuffles broke out; there was an altercation about whether the window should be open or not; Conor pulled someone's hair. I snapped. "Will you shut the f*ck up," I screamed at them. Sudden, blissful silence. Something had changed. No more Mr Nice Guy. I felt, of course, that I had failed, but oddly enough, they seemed to like me the more for it.

Our next meeting was at the Globe Theatre on the Southbank. I contrived things so that they didn't see the auditorium at first. I took them backstage then threw the doors open and there they were, onstage in that astonishing building.

They were all, without exception, and for the first time, stunned. Conor strode to the front of the stage. "Two 'ouseolds bofe alike in dignity," he declaimed, "In fair Verona where we set our scene."

A small miracle occurred up there on the stage of the Globe. They started acting - gave themselves over to the characters and the situation, not commenting on it, or sending it up, just doing it. And one of them, Henry, a dreamer and a charmer but scarcely present mentally in the classes, became transformed: vital, sharp, witty.

When the session ended and the kids sped off to - what was it? Communications with Ali Campbell, Human Rights with Cherie? Yachting with Ellen Macarthur? - the cameraman, a professionally hard-bitten breed, said, "What happened to Henry? He was brilliant."

I got rather sentimental in anticipation of the final session, where, back at the school, we would do this same scene, but with props and costumes. It was their final presentation.

They'd really want to give it their best shot, I
was sure.

Wrong, as so often, again.

They'd been for a piss-up the night before and were sleepy, hung-over, late, bolshie. Some of them simply weren't there, didn't show up at all.

As we sat in a circle, I tried to get them to read the scene with intelligence, attack, a sense of character. Doomed. They mumbled, they scored points off each other, they yawned, they went to the loo and never came back. With heavy heart, I told them to choose costumes and got them up on the little stage. Again, they astonished me: they were highly stimulated by the frocks and the prop knives and threw themselves into the scene, directing each other - "you gotta be angry on that line or I can't say my line", says Carl; Nana Kwame says: "I is the prince, you gotta shut up." They repeatedly asked if they could do the scene again to get it better; and they did, and it was. And then it was all over. We hugged; I told them they could email me, and that I'd look out for them.

I never heard from anyone.

Did the four weeks make any difference to them at all? Is there a fragment of something that has stuck? My abiding memory is of formless inchoate energy, intelligence, personality, dreams. No structure, no containment, no clear path. Any one of them, individually, could break the pattern, get focus, start to reap rewards.

Together they were laughing, fighting, skiving their way to nowhere. They knew this, but the prospect had no reality for them. My great lesson from them was that my job was to find out how to harness their natural gifts, above all by doing.

Talking was not the way. At one despairing point along the way, I had an email exchange with Andrew Motion (who was teaching poetry) in which we came to the conclusion that the programme wasn't about the kids at all - it was about us - us, the would-be teachers, under pressure.

I can't say I did very brilliantly. I am humbled at the thought of the teachers who take on this many-headed hydra day in and day out. I LIKED the kids so much.

Simon Callow at Jamie Oliver's school of broken dreams

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