Well, that was depressing.
Annabel Baptist’s new play The Best Years of Our Lives takes its ironic cue from the 1946 film of the same name. Where that post-war dose of reality revealed that US soldiers returning victorious from the front line encountered not joy back home, but alienation, depression and isolation, Baptist’s play shows that everyday students can go through exactly the same emotional trauma from the battlegrounds of Oxford’s academic expectations.
The play follows the final undergraduate year of four friends living in a shared flat. Each of them occupies a different band on the spectrum of emotional instability. At one end we have Toby, breezing through life, well-adjusted and relaxed. One step down is Hannah, selfish and morbid: she likes to imagine death, but only as a way of getting her friends together round her bed. Further down the scale is Grace, a hard-working student whose tutor is not happy with her recent performance, and has (somewhat implausibly) summoned her to a competency meeting with a view to being sent down. And right at the bottom is poor James. His drive, confidence and sanity are gradually getting eroded, and he is vanishing as a personality before our very eyes, unable to articulate his despair to his friends. Even the audience don’t really know what’s going on with James, and there is a truly shocking and saddening moment when he looks at his latest emails. We see the opening words of the most recent, which simply say, ‘Dear James, You have submitted a blank form….’
It is a sobering and upsetting perspective. And while I would not cast doubt on the experience of people who have been through the mental turmoil Baptist lays before us, I do have to say that, in the real world, things don’t have to get that bad. Colleges have, or should have, experienced welfare teams alive to the needs of students who may be having difficulties of any kind at all, and their role is to help find a way through the problems. And if any tutor were to behave in the way Grace’s does in The Best Years of Our Lives, then they should not be teaching students. Period.
Best Years’ relentless negativity and reluctance to share confidences may be true to life, but it does not make for the most scintillating theatre. It's more effort than entertainment. While holding the mirror up to Nature, Art doesn’t actually have to be Nature. Some lighter moments on the gloomy road to tragedy would intensify the experience, and give light and shade along the journey. So pervasive was the pessimism on display that I did almost feel like Grace when she complained, ‘I don’t have the energy’. Right up to the final quarter of the show, plot development goes at a snail’s pace.
But these are quibbles. In fact that pace is quite deliberate. Despite its occasional lapses this play is a slow burn, and it builds imperceptibly to a devastating climax. It’s been written with dedication and pain, and it’s acted with dead-pan realism.
On the way out, afflicted with incredulity, I asked some of the students in the audience if that is what life is really like for them. Their reply didn’t entirely reassure me: ‘Well… not all the time.’ Annabel Baptist, you’ve not just written a play. You’ve performed a public service.