Play: Slag

Overview
David Hare’s Slag, first staged in 1970, is a sharp, fast-moving satirical comedy set in an English girls’ school where competing ideas about education, authority, and the politics of gender crash into one another. Written at the beginning of Hare’s career, it showcases his flair for polemic and his taste for theatrical collision: ferocious argument coexists with farce, and intellectual schemes short-circuit under the pressure of everyday chaos. The title’s abrasive slang signals the play’s interest in labels, the policing of women’s behavior, and the way language can be used to wound, control, or rebrand.

Setting and Premise
The action unfolds largely in the staffroom and assembly spaces of a crumbling, underfunded school. Three teachers, each with her own doctrinal approach, vie to define what a girls’ education ought to be. One imagines a refuge of discipline and tradition, another presses for progressive reforms and personal liberation, and a third clings to pragmatic survival in a system designed to exhaust idealists. The headship is contested, the building literally leaks, and the pupils hover just offstage as a presence and a pressure, a reminder that real lives are shaped by adult experiments.

Plot Outline
Slag pivots on a series of confrontations as the staff faces bad inspections, intermittent strikes, and the perpetual threat of closure. A new initiative to modernize the curriculum is met with clerical outrage and bureaucratic obstruction. Assemblies disintegrate into rallies. A mock trial intended to teach civics turns into a purging of grievance. The teachers’ ideological lines, religious rectitude, emancipatory zeal, managerial quietism, harden into factional struggle, then melt under the heat of humiliation and fatigue. Rumors circulate about staff conduct and sexual propriety, and the title’s slur becomes both a weapon and a theme: who gets to name whom, and to what end.

As the term unspools, the women attempt coups both petty and grand: rewriting timetables, suborning the secretary, seizing the lectern, performing righteousness for inspectors and donors. Practicalities sabotage principle at every turn. The climactic moments layer mishap upon misjudgment, an evacuation drill that reveals no one knows the exits, an inspection report that praises the school’s ethos while condemning nearly everything it does, a final meeting where victory would mean inheriting a shell. By the end, none of the factions has triumphed. The school limps toward an uncertain future, and the play leaves its protagonists facing the cost of being right without being effective.

Themes and Ideas
Hare targets the brittleness of institutions asked to carry contradictory mandates: nurture individuality, yet standardize outcomes; empower girls, yet replicate social hierarchies. The women’s ideological commitments, however sincerely held, double as strategies for self-defense in a culture that scrutinizes and devalues their authority. The play treats language as a moral terrain: slurs and slogans, mission statements and minutes, all jostle for power, and rhetoric repeatedly outpaces reality. Idealism is not mocked so much as tested against material limits, money, time, the weather, and against the corrosive effect of perpetual public judgment.

Style and Impact
Slag moves with the velocity of farce, door slams, quick reversals, sudden revelations, yet pauses for combative, lucid argument. Scenes are built to expose gaps between intention and outcome, creating comedy edged with despair. The all-female focus was itself a provocation in 1970, and the play’s argument about who controls the narrative of women’s lives still lands with bite. As an early statement of Hare’s preoccupations, public institutions in crisis, the ethics of leadership, the collision of belief and practice, it announced a dramatist eager to turn the staffroom into a battleground for the soul of the society beyond it.