Broadhurst Theatre - 235 44th st (Bway/8th)

Easily the best new play on broadway this year! A play so complex and rich that one could easily see it a few times and still discover new aspects. It is a play about education, about words, about, about maturing - intellectually and otherwise and it refreshingly avoids to peddle in moral certainties. Set in an English public school in the 80 - the period of the Thatcher years, the time of the great sell-out of any values that can't be measured with a cash register. This limited engagement of the original production from the the London National Theater of Great Britain shows theater at is best. The acting is near perfect, the lines of this intellectual firework are placed into the room to explode with maximum effect. At one point, Frances de la Tour as the dry, maybe somewhat bitter history teacher brings the house to its feet with single dead-pan line out of nowhere as the opening of a unexpected monolog : "I have not hitherto been allotted an inner voice…" (you'll have to see it to believe!).

What started out as little intellectual game playing to beat the system (admission exams to elite universities in this case) ends up in the major league of political propaganda - the opening scene introduces the former english teacher as todays cold and calculating political advisor - a figure only too familiar It's the kind of people who credibly could say something like this with a straight face: "The loss of liberty is the price we pay for freedom" - but maybe we have lost long time ago, when we traded humanity for utilitarian efficiency.