Play for Today: The Right Prospectus
The Right Prospectus was the second ever play in the Play for Today series and it’s a corker. I suspect probably I will either go on for reams about it or not have that much to say but it’s one of the strangest things I have ever seen so it has to appear here. It is probably also one of those great pieces of television.
The plot is simple, in that an adult man and his wife visit boys’ boarding schools just as if they are looking for a school for their son, before themselves starting school in the school they fix on. Both of them. In separate houses. The play is largely about their experience of doing that. They both react quite differently to school life. You will see online that they are in school to complete their education, but I think this is reading something into the play. In fact the motivation for two adults to suddenly go back to school is never mentioned, and that is one of the really bizarre things about this play.
It is partly one of the greats because it is by John Osborne, famous for belonging to the kicthen sink and angry young man schools of theatre drama after World War 2, and famous for his play Look Back in Anger. Looking at his other television work on IMDb, television films and plays feature highly, all of them rather more highbrow than the sort of things I would normally blog about. Frankly it sounds as if making this play was a complete nightmare, predominantly because they couldn’t find a boarding shcool willing to be used as the location, and when they did find one, it scuttled Osborne’s wish that his wife be cast as the wife.
You will readily see that this set up is susceptible to all sorts of interpretations, including the one familiar from the recent If... that the school represents society, or a reflection on human behaviour in institutions, or even just commentary on schooling. It’s interesting that the man muses on whether he can afford his own school fees: I’m personally going to allow that he wasn’t totally subsumed into the world of boyhood and for dramatic reasons is given a foot in both worlds to allow him to be our commentator. The critics were hugely appreciative of this play.
I have one huge criticism of this play, which you may wish to dismiss as a result of my refusing to suspend my disbelief here and just go with the play. It is that as well as actors who were school age, adult men were cast as some of the schoolboys. Yes, I do realise that when you leave school you are an adult so adults do go to school but I think they are too old. I think this partly because there are a couple of shower scenes where the older actors are seen nude, and it is very apparent that these aren’t school boys. The other problem is it makes you wonder how the wife is coping with the open showers in her own house.
In fact I think the play would have been better without having any of the boys notice that the wife is female (at one point they are looking up her skirt) or even have just the husband go in without the wife. The play is ultimately not realistic, and I think the intrusion of an actual woman would create more disturbance than it does here, so better to stick with the unreality and ignore that she is a woman. Otherwise the talk about sex revolves around the matron, masturbation and a bit of school homosexuality and best to leave it at that. But please don’t run away with the idea that I think these criticisms are fatal: this play has a very bizarre subject-matter and so is naturally difficult to manage.
Otherwise the play is a fascinating experiment in filming a sort of dream situation, which is open to multiple interpretations and is by one of the greats of British theatre.
Credit: I am heavily indebted to this blog post about this play: https://forgottentelevisiondrama.wordpress.com/2020/07/01/play-for-today-the-right-prospectus/
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