The Merthyr Stigmatist
www.shermantheatre.co.uk
It’s Friday afternoon in a Catholic school in Wales and Carys is in detention again, with the week-stretching burden of supervision falling to teacher Siân. Seeing that the 16-year-old has both wrists hospital-bandaged, our immediate fear is self-harm: a possibility that remains in play throughout, although the title The Merthyr Stigmatist levitates another explanation that gives Lisa Parry’s digital world premiere (online until 12 June) its heft.
The tutorial two-hander is a small but powerful theatrical sub-genre, encompassing Barrie Keeffe’s Gotcha (1976), Willy Russell’s Educating Rita (1980) and David Mamet’s Oleanna (1992). The attraction for a dramatist is that the power dynamic of a teacher-pupil encounter defies usual age and rank hierarchy: the instructor may (a positive) learn from or (a negative) yearn for their pupil – the teaching scenes in Shaw’s Pygmalion (1913) somewhere underlie these modern plays – and the junior figure can very easily destroy the reputation or life of the senior one with a claim of misconduct.
