The relevance of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream to modern audiences isn’t exactly the type of storyline you expect to see in a weeknight 5 drama. But the Bard’s fantastical comedy is the kindling to a cancel culture fire in the brand-new third series of The Teacher, thanks to its apparent issues regarding consent. Yes, I rolled my eyes too.
It’s poor Miss Helen Simpson (Victoria Hamilton), the recently promoted Head of Drama at a posh private school, who must field this complaint in her classroom, as one student in particular takes aim at her choice for the summer play. Cressida Bancroft (Alice Grant) is confident, conscientious and bright – all good qualities in a young student, though Helen would rather she channelled her energy into engaging with Shakespeare’s significance as a genius playwright rather than disparaging his 16th-century attitudes. “They’re trying to cancel Shakespeare!” she exasperatedly complains to a colleague.
So-called “cancel culture” has become an easy way for TV writers to create animosity between two characters and to bring down powerful people a peg or two. We’ve seen it in Channel 4’s Douglas is Cancelled, about a newsreader whose life and career is destroyed when he makes a sexual joke at a wedding, and in Netflix’s 2021 comedy The Chair, which also took aim at the world of academia, detailing the downfall of a lecturer who is “cancelled” after making a tasteless, badly timed joke.
But this series of The Teacher flips the usual script on its head, by making the person at the sticky end of criticism – the cancellee, if you will – the sympathetic character. So extreme is Cressida’s suggestion that one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays – one that is largely about fairies and a man with the head of a donkey, mind you – should be discarded from the curriculum, that it’s impossible to take her side. Burning a pile of copies of the play outside her teacher’s house doesn’t exactly help her cause, either. I don’t know about you, but I was shaking in frustration along with Helen.
Alice Grant as Cressida Bancroft in ‘The Teacher’ (Photo: Unai Mateo/Clapperboard/Channel 5)Another way of describing being “cancelled” is simply as the experience of learning that your words and actions have consequences. That works when you’re a TV presenter who has been having inappropriate relationships or a newspaper columnist inciting violence against Meghan Markle – people who at least have a chance to learn and atone for their mistakes, whether they end up doing so or not. It’s a bit different when the object of your desired cancellation has been dead for centuries.
Of course, there’s no problem with taking a critical view of aspects of Shakespeare – but refusing to engage with one of his plays at all means you miss your chance to do that.
So dramatic is the idea that Shakespeare should no longer be studied that it ends up a diversion from the central storyline. Also in Helen’s class is Dee, a transgender pupil who has recently changed their name and pronouns – something their teacher is respectful of but struggles to remember when it matters, much to the disgust of Cressida. When Helen is driven to distraction by Cressida’s nasty nagging, her ire spills over to Dee and – during an intense outburst – she tells them they “might as well kill themselves now”. Devastatingly, that has a lethal impact on Dee.
As the next episodes play out over this week, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Shakespeare storyline is left by the wayside as the show moves into this darker territory. However, the opening episode isn’t just a set-up for the remainder of The Teacher – it’s also a reminder of the pressure cooker that students and teachers are put in together, where they can get locked in battles trying to prove to one another that they are right.
This might be an outrage-baiting, unrealistic look at cancel culture (it is a 5 drama after all) but at the very least, The Teacher gets to the crux of the real sin: getting so caught up in petty disagreements that we overlook where real feelings get hurt.
‘The Teacher’ continues tomorrow at 9pm on 5
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