KEY POINTS:
School is awful. I have been thinking about this lately and have come to the conclusion that schooldays must constitute one of the most torturous times of one's life.
Why? Because young people are rotten, or at least rotten to one another. Horrible, feral, mean. Closer to animals than to human beings in their ability to recognise weakness and pounce. To inflict lasting damage swiftly and terribly, with minimal effort and the few paltry weapons to hand.
Sartre said "hell is other people". Really he meant "hell is other children".
Young people are unsurpassed in their ability to hurt. This is why school becomes a nightmare for some, irrespective of educational institution or academic ability.
I started along this line of thought a few weeks ago, with predator/prey analogies for the schoolyard. I went to the theatre this week and had my thesis confirmed.
Loser is a play by Auckland playwright Thomas Sainsbury. It's a savagely funny romp through high school, a blackly hilarious script chewed up with gusto by a talented cast, helped by the fact that most of them aren't long out of school uniform in real life.
The action flips back and forth between the past and the present; culminating in that most fruitful of fictional scenarios, the school reunion.
School reunions are a wonderful resource for storytellers, the narrative equivalent of keeping a tin of tomatoes and some "good" olive oil in the cupboard at all times in case of a culinary emergency.
What could be more fun than taking a disparate group of characters and cramming them all together in some inhospitable school hall, forcing them not only to interact with one another but also to look back on their shared adolescent experience and ponder where life has led them since that time?
For most of us, the prospect is a grim one. Who would choose to spend the evening giving account of oneself and one's doings over the intervening decade to a bunch of schoolmates you never liked anyway?
The chances of getting through such an evening without recourse to lots of drink and plenty of lies are slim.
Of course, there are a few entertainment possibilities. How better to spend an evening than by bearing witness to the spiritual/mental and especially physical degradation wrought on past nemeses by the vicissitudes of life?
Missing my reunion was an unexpected benefit of emigration, but friends assure me you haven't lived till you've caught up with the most popular girl at school 10 years down the track when she's drinking RTDs, with three small kids and a husband on the dole.
The delights of schadenfreude aside, though, reunions must be the most pointless of social gatherings. They are second only to baby showers in terms of redundancy (why do pregnant women need presents? Your womb works! Well done! Surely a baby is affirmation enough?) and weddings in terms of events with potential for self-destruction and shame.
There are really only two types of people who could possibly look forward to a reunion. The self-satisfied gits, so thrilled with the job/partner/money they've accrued in the intervening years since they left school that they can't wait to share it with their former classmates.
Bumping into one of this lot condemns one to conversation of the interminable "so, what have you been up to" variety. In this scenario, I like to think of John Cusack, whose professional assassin has to attend his high school reunion in the matchless Grosse Point Blank: "Hi, how are you? I'm Martin Blank, remember me? I'm not married, no kids, but I'd blow your head off if someone paid me enough." Some career trajectories are more easily explained than others.
Better, though, to be stuck with the men than the women in this category; at least the blokes won't bray at you about babies and wave pictures of rotten children under your nose all night.
The other group is a different kettle of fish, deserving of pity. These are the poor souls who never quite got over leaving school.
The educational experience was the pinnacle of existence for this bunch of losers. Graduation spat them cruelly out of the womb of learning and they have never been as happy since.
One or more of this lot organised the whole benighted affair, motivated by a desire to see "the old crowd" and remember the good old days once more. They'll be the ones handing you your name-badge, ready to embark on an orgy of "do you remembers" at the drop of a hat.
The fact that these people were universally reviled while at school only makes their determination to relive the whole thing all the more perverse.
Apart from those two tribes, then, stand the rest of us. Those of us who got through our schooldays mercifully, miraculously unharmed and have been stumbling through life ever since.
It's the speedy flight of time that surprises those of us engaged in the latter. How can a decade have passed while we're still deciding what to be when we grow up? And how can we be grown up already?
The awkwardness of the reunion is compounded by the embarrassment of having to own up to ageing, in public, among your peers. It's the social equivalent of trying to fit into the blazer or gymslip you wore at 17. Unless you're a freak it won't fit, and there's no point trying to force it.
Doing so will only lead to severe physical discomfort and end up with you feeling very stupid. Attending your school reunion will yield exactly the same result.
Loser, by Thomas Sainsbury, is on at The Herald Theatre until tomorrow.
