“Jihadist plot to take over city schools.” Fairly grabs your attention, doesn’t it? Not to mention send a shiver down your spine. And so it should – if it were true.

But Birmingham Mail’s front page splash, prompted by a letter to Birmingham City Council – a leaked letter, an anonymous letter, an undated letter – was anything but.

As were accusations that Tahir Alam, the then Chairman of Governors of Park View secondary and two feeder primaries, together with a cabal of hard-line extremists aka “big bad Muslim men”, were conducting a covert campaign whose ultimate goal was the “Islamisation” of schools.

But as the old saying goes: why let facts get in the way of a good story? A tactic deployed not only by the press, but as is suggested by writers Helen Monks and Matt Woodhead (co-founders of the Barnsley-based LUNG theatre company) government officials.

So if you don’t want to know the score, Michael Gove, look away now. Particularly when the touring production, in association with Leeds Playhouse, swings by Parliament later in the year. It’s sure to make your blue eyes brown!

Adapted from over 200 hours of interviews and public documents, Trojan Horse (the subject line of the leaked letter) runs the risk of much verbatim theatre in being dry, didactic and undramatic. And though the text largely comprises a string of monologues stitched together by drilled Q&As and fleeting exchanges, the production is anything but.

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Set against an expansive blackboard upon which key words and phrases are stylishly projected in both English and Urdu (headsets provide an Urdu translation), and bolstered by a Bhangra-banging score which fizzes with energy and youth, urgency and alarm, Matt Woodhead’s fast-paced and tightly-choreographed direction brings the best out of his five-strong cast who flit between an array of pupils and teachers, civil servants and court officials, including a closeted teenager fearful of her father’s heavy-handed response.

Two things stick in the mind. First, the image of an angry young man seething with anger at being falsely accused and publicly vilified by a hostile press working in cahoots with a callous government. How and to whom shall he vent his fury?

And second, the juxtaposition of Thatcher’s “There’s no such thing as society” with a “lost” Muslim man’s raison d’etre for turning his life around and becoming a teacher: on being asked “what are you doing for society?”

A question which the writers flip on its head by asking: what has society done to him, his colleagues, his pupils and his community?

Peter Callaghan
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