Since it appeared in 1992 most people, (me included), have regarded David Mamet's play Oleanna, which tells the story of a disastrous series of meetings between a university teacher and one of his students, as a drama about the early skirmishes of the so-called culture wars. The production I saw of it in 2004 gave me the impression that there was a hero - the university teacher - and there was a villain - the student. The production of the play that is now running in London reveals that it is much more complex and interesting than that, and that it has no heroes or villains. It isn't about a hapless man unable to understand the demands of feminism, as I had imagined; it is a play about understanding and misunderstanding more broadly, about the meaninglessness of much that passes for intelligent work in academia today and about the dreary treadmill that we have made for younger generations by insisting that university degrees are needed for almost any job.
The play has three acts, and every one of them takes place in the same setting - the office of a university teacher called John, who, it emerges, has, after a long time and hard graft, just recently been approved for tenure - although, crucially, the final documentation has not been completed. At the start of the play, we find John hunched at a desk on the left of the stage. He is talking on the telephone. From what it is possible to tell from his side of the conversation, he is trying to buy a house, and his wife is explaining to him that there is a legal difficulty about the boundaries of the land the house sits on. She wants him to come down to the house to talk to the real estate agent urgently.
Behind John, sitting on the other side of a second desk is a young woman. She is a little scruffily dressed and not visibly in the business of spending much time on making herself look attractive. Eventually John gets off the telephone, writes some notes and then, at last, turns to her.
"I'm sorry", he says, not a moment too soon. The young woman replies by asking him about a phrase she overheard him use during his telephone conversation.
"What's a term of art?" she asks. He looks astounded. "Is that what you want to talk about?" he demands. He then adds a little speech that I continue to find mystifying:
"Let's take the mysticism out of it, shall we? Carol? Don't you think? I'll tell you: when you have some "thing". Which must be broached. Don't you think?"
Carol is clearly confused by this. What is impossible to know is whether they had been conversing and were interrupted by the telephone call John has just finished. Do John's remarks relate to that earlier conversation, or is he being extremely rude, simply telling Carol that he knows better than her what is a suitable subject for discussion? Although he then apologises and tries to answer Carol's question, somehow the dialogue between them remains mystifying
This is clever, since Carol has come to see her teacher to explain that she finds everything that he is trying to teach her completely perplexing. She knows she is failing, and she doesn't know how to make sense of the fact that, as she tells John, she is doing what she is told, she is taking notes, but she still understands nothing. As it is difficult to understand much of what John is saying, it is hard not to feel some sympathy for her dilemma.
John tells Carol that she is "an incredibly bright girl." She tries to interrupt, and he starts again, saying "You're an incredibly ... you have no problem with the ... " but then he ends up with, "Who's kidding who?", which I take to mean that he doesn't think she is "incredibly bright". He quotes a sentence she has written in an assignment - "I think that the ideas contained in this work express the author's feelings in a way that he intended, based on his results." John seems to think that this sentence is faulty, although it doesn't seem to me to be any more difficult to understand than most of what he says, nor much of what passes for intelligent writing these days: to take just the latest example I have noticed, among many, here is something that I read just now. It is written by a distinguished poet to explain how he chose the winners of a poetry prize:
"I primarily looked for work that saw the theme of metamorphosis as a frame, and within which might take the freedom - both a blessing and a curse at times - to a place that will encourage both the artist and their audience to be able respond to the work over time."
John explains to Carol that he thinks she is angry. She says it is true that she has problems because she comes from a social and economic milieu that is unlike that of most of her fellow students, but that she absolutely has to pass John's course.
The two talk across each other, the telephone rings, regularly interrupting their already disjointed dialogue of the deaf. In a moving outcry, Carol beseeches John, saying:
"Teach me. Teach me ... I want to understand".
She goes on to explain her dilemma in greater detail:
"There are people out there. People who came here. To know something they didn't know. Who came here. To be helped. To be helped. So someone would help them. To do something. To know something. To get, what do they say? 'To get on in the world.' How can I do that if I don't, if I fail? But I don't understand. I don't understand. I don't understand what anything means ... and I walk around. From morning 'til night: with this one thought in my head. I'm stupid."
John again brushes her assertion aside, insisting she is angry, and then proceeds to say that he too always thought of himself as stupid and still does. He goes on to denigrate the whole system of testing and grades at his institution, decrying as a worthless farce the "article of faith...that all are entitled to Higher Education", pointing out that we "have ceased to ask, 'What is it good for?'"
Carol asks why he is involved in the education system, if he thinks it so bad, and he replies, "I do it because I love it", which, although he clearly doesn't recognise it, is an immensely arrogant thing to say to her, suggesting that he believes himself part of the elite who should be educated, while she is misguided in seeking an education.
More foolishly still, the next thing John does is to decide to take the first piece of advice he gave to Carol and apply it to himself - to "take the mysticism" out of the relationship between himself and Carol, shedding the mystique of being the "teacher":
"If we're going to take off the Artificial stricture, of 'Teacher' and 'Student', why should my problems be any more a mystery than your own?" he asks Carol. Her perplexity only deepens, and her respect, (possibly limited already), visibly begins to diminish. John achieves nothing helpful by his decision - which runs parallel with the modern insistence that hierarchy is 'an artificial construct' and not only unhelpful but 'elitist'. In fact, he naively begins his own downfall.
Meanwhile, Carol's desire for understanding is not assuaged and John doesn't even notice that he understands almost nothing about anything at all, least of all what it is she is worried about.
As the play goes on, Carol evolves from believing she has no power, to discovering that she has, possibly partly thanks to John's decision to "take off the Artificial stricture" and place the pair of them on an equal footing. John does not evolve at all and his career is destroyed. The final scene is horribly violent. Carol still understands nothing about the course she is supposed to be studying. Perhaps the fact that John is at the end barred from teaching the rubbish he spouts is a good thing - except that we know that there will always be another mediocrity to take his place.
What does become clear is that both characters are victims of one of contemporary society's most gigantic cons - that university education is valuable for everyone, no matter what. Both the play's characters are engaged in an enterprise - mass university education - that is not at all worthwhile for either of them. Sexual politics, it turns out, is just a side issue to the central core of the play, (or possibly a by-product, borne of the frustration and anger of people in a system that is entirely unsuitable for them). The question of whether it is useful or helpful for large numbers of people to go to university and study, not because they love ideas, but "to get on in the world", as Carol puts it, is at the heart of the piece and, judging by Oleanna, the answer is no, it is not worth it, the enterprise is not merely pointless but damaging for most of the people concerned.
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(On a flippant note, one thing it is impossible not to think, each time the telephone interrupts John and Carol, usually at moments when they seem poised on the point of understanding each other, is that the greatest evidence of John's foolishness is his failure to pull the cord out of the back of the thing temporarily - or to at least take the receiver off the hook.
I was also interested to hear echoes of Carol when I read an article in the Guardian the day after watching Oleanna, in which a woman from Pakistan described going to law school, where, she said, “a lot of white female professors told me to quit”; when she finally emerged with a qualification and started working in NGOs, she claimed to be "obstructed in every possible way" by white women. I heard Carol in her baffled angry pride and misunderstanding of what may well have been offered as cooperative collaboration in editing a piece of writing but which she took to be an attack, probably borne of racism:
"Every time I would write a report there would be 10 people who would shred it", the woman from Pakistan told the Guardian, "telling me how I was wrong and I was failing and I didn’t know this and I didn’t know that. I was either never allowed to speak or entrapped.”
On one occasion only did John appear to have any real intelligence - the moment when, having been informed that he is to be given a surprise party, he tells Carol that a surprise can sometimes be a form of aggression.
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