Onjali Q Rauf’s 2018 novel The Boy At The Back Of The Class aimed to humanise the refugee crisis for young readers. Told in the first person by a schoolgirl, Alexa, it tells the story of how nine-year-old Ahmet, a Syrian refugee, joins a primary school class in England and Alexa and her three friends, Josie, Tom and Michael, make friends with him and learn how he came to be there.
Alexa and her friends go to school with, amongst others, the spoiled brat Clarissa and the school bully, Brendan. There is an empty chair at the back of the class where Clarissa’s friend, Dena, used to sit. One day, Ahmet arrives and sits there instead. He speaks Kurdish and has no English, so as the play progresses, the friends get to know him and so do we.
It turns out Ahmet is a brilliant footballer, which is a reliable pass into social acceptability. Later, Alexa discovers she has a special connection with Ahmet: her father died and Ahmet’s sister, Syrah, was drowned at sea as she and Ahmet fled from Syria.
Nick Ahad’s stage adaptation keeps Alexa’s first-person narrative, apart from a thrilling end of act 1 coup de theatre when Ahmet steps off the front of the stage and speaks to the audience in English, “my name is Ahmet and this is my story”.
The play progresses through a series of episodes: a football match, a quest to buy a pomegranate for Ahmet and a mission to ask the queen to help find Ahmet’s parents. This is a heart-on-sleeve, moral tale with an unambiguous message: be kind. The moral lessons are signposted along the way; Alexa’s Mum says, “we meet meanness with kindness because kindness is more powerful,” and later, Alexa says, “he’s the same as me. He’s the same as all of us.”
The show has a message for grown-ups, too. Talk to your children about difficult topics, because if you don’t, other people will and you might not like what they are being told.
If that sounds a bit boring to watch, it isn’t. I am wary of overly instrumentalist, educational theatre for young people. If you start from the premise that a play’s educational content outweighs any need to be entertaining, then the result can be pretty grim. I have no problem with theatre as moral instruction when it is done as well as this, though.
There are few theatrical experiences more enjoyable than watching a great show with a large and excited young audience. I went to a Thursday afternoon matinée with hundreds of primary school children, and the combination of an afternoon off school, a packed audience and possibly more sugar than was strictly good for them meant they were bouncing off the walls with excitement before the show even started.
The actors pitched their performances perfectly. You can measure the approval of a young audience in decibels, and they adored it. The actors trod a fine line between panto business and serious drama. They acknowledged the audience was there, so everyone booed Brendan the bully, they laughed at the physical comedy and when Brendan (Joe McNamara) turned to the audience and said, “do you support Wolves?” he got a vocal, but by no means unanimous, response.
When a frightened Ahmet (Farshid Rokey) first entered, he was welcomed onto the stage with a friendly "hallo Ahmet" from the audience, and when he said his first word ("hanar"—Kurdish for pomegranate), there was a huge cheer. I must admit, I found the combination of a compassionate story, terrific performances and the audience’s complete absorption in it unexpectedly moving.
The Boy At The Back Of The Class isn’t a tick-in-a-box, education and outreach studio show. This is proper, big stage, main house theatre with a cast of ten, an impressive school gym climbing frame set by Lily Arnold and sophisticated sound and lighting design from Giles Thomas and Ryan Day respectively.
Monique Touko’s staging has been done before, but the execution is flawless. Waving a big sheet of blue fabric to make the sea, zooming around on office chairs on wheels to make a car, miming a football match without a ball—every school play everywhere has used these techniques, but the attention to detail, and Kloe Dean’s meticulous choreography, lift it into something special.
My main test of theatre for young people is to ask: if this was a child’s first visit to the theatre, would they want to go again? In the case of The Boy At The Back Of The Class, the answer is a resounding and emphatic yes.
The Boy At The Back Of The Class is at the Wolverhampton Grand until Saturday 20 April then on tour until June 2024 visiting Norwich, Newcastle, Blackpool, Coventry, Canterbury, Poole and Leicester.