A PLAY about one of Australia’s most underrated professions is about to take the stage at The Playhouse, and it’s bound to have primary school teachers falling about in agonised laughter.

“Chalkface,” written by Angela Betzien, is being touted by Sydney Theatre Company and the State Theatre Company SA as “a love letter to teachers”, but when I catch up with Jessica Arthur, Sydney Theatre Company’s resident director, she’s more inclined to describe it as “a black comedy”.

Betzien, now an internationally-known known writer of plays such as “The Hanging”, “Egg”, “Helicopter” and “Children of the Black Skirt” and a core writer on “Total Control”, has not written comedy before, but according to Arthur, the subject has been on her mind for a while, since a lot of her best friends are teachers who have been telling her for years about the issues raised.

Set in the here and now in a staffroom of a public primary school, it’s a sort of naturalistic piece that works around on the old “newcomer” theme, where a bright-eyed and bushy tailed new graduate with a masters, Anna, played by Stephanie Somerville, comes into the staffroom. 

There she encounters a veteran teacher, played by Catherine McClements, who’s been there for more than 20 years and has a low opinion of her colleagues. The sparks fly. 

“It’s very fast paced, and we jump around,” Arthur says. 

Dramatically there is the older teacher facing off against the young one, but there are all the other characters of the staffroom too, played by Ezra Juanta, Michelle Ny and Nathan O’Keefe.

Primary school teachers, Arthur says, are assailed with stereotypical views, the best-known being that it’s a piece of cake because of all the holidays. 

Not so. The questions of burnout, inadequate resources and lack of funding, discipline and getting reports done all surface, although Arthur assures me that “at heart, it’s really beautiful”.

“What the teachers are doing, which is essentially essential, is something quite beautiful and deep, even though teachers may not feel supported as they should.”

A strange kind of humour about how we cope permeates the play, she says, and it feels very true, because we laugh at things that are hard.

The message behind “Chalkface” is that every child is different, so that schools need to cater for this and it questions how we are teaching, how our system works, how to bring out the best in students and whether specialised learning plans are the way to go.

As well, with the antagonists – the office administrator, and the principal – there is some commentary on hierarchy and division.

A nice touch, she says, is that one of the characters is the kindy music teacher and that allows for light relief.

So far, Arthur reports, the recognition factor has been very strong in audiences, with a lot of “oh, that happened to me” reactions, especially regarding the messy things, such as kids throwing up in class. 

“There’s a lot of muck in there,” she says. “But It’s very, very funny… it’s Angela’s first comedy and she’s done a great job.”

Is there a happy ending? Of course she’s not about to say, but it certainly is about hope, about putting teachers front and centre, about throwing light on the system about what a place of learning can be. 

There are no answers, but it offers a real conversation, she says, adding mysteriously that in the play there is “a bit of a mystery involved when Anna stumbles across something that doesn’t seem right”. 

“Chalkface”, The Playhouse, November 9-12.