Theatre review: Every Day I Make Greatness Happen

Launching Hampstead Theatre's autumn season Downstairs is a play by high school teacher and comparatively new playwright Richard Molloy. Sticking to the tenet of writing about what you know and reaping the results, he sets Every Day I Make Greatness Happen in a little-used, leaky-roofed classroom in a North London school, where students are not allowed to join the Sixth Form unless they've passed their English GCSE. For three students who failed it, the Head of English, Miss Murphy (Susan Stanley,) has agreed to coach them through a re-take while they also take their AS-level classes. They have six weeks to make their second chance count and be allowed to stay on. Iman (Josh Zaré) is timid and nerdy but a bit slow, and has spent the last five years at school being relentlessly bullied by Kareem (Moe Bar-El.)

Neither of them know Alisha (Sofia Barclay,) the third member of the class who missed a lot of school the previous year, and whose eloquence and bright personality immediately raise the question of how she could have failed in the first place.

This is an unpretentious play - in the programme notes Molloy says he doesn't have any ulterior motive in the play other than to entertain - but a deceptively well-constructed one. The basic structure is fairly predictable: On top of their existing dislike of each other, the two boys also immediately compete for Alisha's affections, and their personal lives start to interfere with their ability to do coursework; meanwhile Miss Murphy also starts to unravel with the overwork and the feeling of being stuck in a job she hates.

Within this framework it's the character work Molloy does that's impressive, particularly in the way our sympathies flip between the characters, the quiet Iman easily getting the audience on side from the start against the bullying, endlessly annoying Kareem, but a few twists and turns in the plot leave things looking a lot greyer, and both boys revealing themselves to be prolific liars. Meanwhile it's easy to sympathise with the exhausted, frazzled Miss Murphy, but also see her through Alisha's filter as a bit of a monster. Similarly, getting the Head of Sixth Form involved is the ultimate threat to the students but Jon Foster's John turns out to be a calming influence whose romantic advances Miss Murphy is interested in but not ready for.

Alice Hamilton's lively production shows off how well the play shifts gears - seen particularly well when Barclay and Bar-El comically defuse the scene where tensions finally go past breaking point for everyone. Lucy Sierra's dingy set is dominated by the drips coming from the ceiling, and if where that subplot's going isn't too surprising it's well-executed. And even if the playwright says he isn't going out of his way to make a political point, the play's focus on the banal coursework the students have to complete to move on - and the restrictions placed on them that make a lie of the claim that the system encourages individuality - tells its own story about the school system. Above all it's every bit as entertaining as intended - a bit of a little gem.

Every Day I Make Greatness Happen by Richard Molloy is booking until the 20th of October at Hampstead Theatre Downstairs.

Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Robert Day.