Runt - our 2025 school-based hit!
Rehearsal photographs by Raf Turki
Production photographs by Raf Turki
In November 2025 Pipeline Theatre went back to school, and asked: why are our children so low on our list of priorities?
Read a paper, go online, watch a party political broadcast, and the recurring discourse (admittedly along with global war and the climate crisis) is about the NHS, pensions, political shenanigans, identity issues, the economy - anything but the most important thing, the thing surely most worth investing in for the future: our children, how we raise and teach them and the schools we put them in.
Schools: now sites of a post-pandemic mental health crisis; smart-phone addiction; crumbling concrete; neuro-diversity on an unprecedented scale; poverty; a recruitment crisis caused by burn-out churn; academy trust dictats and mission statements that bear little relation to the reality on the ground; ultra-processed food, either in lunch-boxes or on canteen trays; an uninspiring exam-driven curriculum; parents too busy, too stressed, too societally marginalised and mistrustful to buy into the system any more on their children’s behalf; and still, even in the midst of all this, in 2024, almost two hundred years after our Victorian forebears were at it - rooms full of rows and rows of chairs, where children are required to sit and be quiet, and ingest knowledge, hour after hour.
You can also find humour, bravery, doggedness, fresh thinking, on-the-fly problem solving, support, kindness, even love. But once those children are on site, what do the rest of us really know? And, parents and teachers aside, which of us really cares?
Our writer, Jon, said:
“Last year I spent some time teaching drama in a local state secondary (years back I used to be a teacher, of languages, unhelpfully). This was after having done a little bit of supply teaching, in Covid-caused fallow times. It was, it has to be said, an out-of-body experience. Now, I might not be the last word in best practice, but this time things felt different, and not always in a good way. It brought home to me that, like nursing, school is also full of front-line workers, less instantly identifiable, and, along with their charges, even less acknowledged. Schools pop up on TV - Waterloo Road, Bad Education - but this is TV-land, where the plot-twist and the set-up and the sight-gag reign supreme. The real world is both smaller and bigger. And theatre is the place to explore that world, and dig out the truth of it.”
“An essential piece of theatre that should be seen by as many people as possible. The actors were so skillful at embodying the roles they both played that it's hard to believe there were only two performers on stage. The play is a masterclass in balancing a truthful heartfelt human story with a clear and undidactic message - who are schools really failing and why?”
“As a teacher, this evening has made me feel ‘heard’ in a really important way”
Read a paper, go online, watch a party political broadcast, and the recurring discourse (admittedly along with global war and the climate crisis) is about the NHS, pensions, political shenanigans, identity issues, the economy - anything but the most important thing, the thing surely most worth investing in for the future: our children, how we raise and teach them and the schools we put them in.
Schools: now sites of a post-pandemic mental health crisis; smart-phone addiction; crumbling concrete; neuro-diversity on an unprecedented scale; poverty; a recruitment crisis caused by burn-out churn; academy trust dictats and mission statements that bear little relation to the reality on the ground; ultra-processed food, either in lunch-boxes or on canteen trays; an uninspiring exam-driven curriculum; parents too busy, too stressed, too societally marginalised and mistrustful to buy into the system any more on their children’s behalf; and still, even in the midst of all this, in 2024, almost two hundred years after our Victorian forebears were at it - rooms full of rows and rows of chairs, where children are required to sit and be quiet, and ingest knowledge, hour after hour.
You can also find humour, bravery, doggedness, fresh thinking, on-the-fly problem solving, support, kindness, even love. But once those children are on site, what do the rest of us really know? And, parents and teachers aside, which of us really cares?
Our writer, Jon, said:
“Last year I spent some time teaching drama in a local state secondary (years back I used to be a teacher, of languages, unhelpfully). This was after having done a little bit of supply teaching, in Covid-caused fallow times. It was, it has to be said, an out-of-body experience. Now, I might not be the last word in best practice, but this time things felt different, and not always in a good way. It brought home to me that, like nursing, school is also full of front-line workers, less instantly identifiable, and, along with their charges, even less acknowledged. Schools pop up on TV - Waterloo Road, Bad Education - but this is TV-land, where the plot-twist and the set-up and the sight-gag reign supreme. The real world is both smaller and bigger. And theatre is the place to explore that world, and dig out the truth of it.”
“An essential piece of theatre that should be seen by as many people as possible. The actors were so skillful at embodying the roles they both played that it's hard to believe there were only two performers on stage. The play is a masterclass in balancing a truthful heartfelt human story with a clear and undidactic message - who are schools really failing and why?”
“As a teacher, this evening has made me feel ‘heard’ in a really important way”
In Autumn 2025, we mounted a mini local tour of 'Runt', performing in studio venues and schools across Cornwall. What was really exciting for us, is that as part of the evolution of the play, this time we were working with eleven young people (of a Year Nine playing age) alongside our two professional actors. These eleven were amazing - they populated a school, took the parts of the two younger characters, and brought the authenticity of their youth to the play.
Although in our work-in-progress the multi-roling of our adult actors was so skilful, and drew so much praise, for this version the thinking was: 'if it's a school, let's make it real - let's have schoolkids'. As an audience, ask yourselves, outside the West End, when was the last time you saw a professional touring play with real young people in it? Would it be possible? How would it work?
Because we believe the issues are so important, we were also hoping that these young people would be a bridge between us and new audiences - parents, teachers, governors, from local schools and colleges, who may not make a habit of seeing touring studio theatre, but for whom the play will resonate enough to change that, and hopefully foster a more general theatre-going interest thereafter.
Safe to say - all these hopes were realised, and then some. We sold out across eleven performances across Cornwall, and the responses were staggering. Here's just one audience member's response:
"The wonderful, no doubt intentional, irony of this cracking play is the fact that its central message - that our schools are a broken irrelevance in the age of social media - was contradicted by the superb performances of the students who are its product! The kids weren’t just all right, they
were amazing. The opening scene where Miss Jessop’s class descends into chaos was performed with such discipline and control that this deafish old man could hear pretty well every line of the overlapping quips and insults and I know enough about the business to recognise that achieving this involves serious work. So well done Jude and Maya and Skyla and Esme and Deva and Thivinya and Finlay and Robbie and Beck - a star ensemble and a brilliant achievement! Jasmine and Immy were given time to flesh out their characters and offered compelling portraits of tortured, unhappy teenagers and the adults were equally convincing reluctant inhabitants of whichever circle of hell secondary school teachers are allotted.
If it wasn’t for this wonderful team the lasting taste of the play would be dispiriting. I spoke to an audience member in the interval who said that in her experience as a grandmother Runt was a pretty accurate picture of a Cornish secondary school. And yet... if those same schools can produce something like this there is a glimmer of hope - and Pipeline deserves a little credit for finding it."
Although in our work-in-progress the multi-roling of our adult actors was so skilful, and drew so much praise, for this version the thinking was: 'if it's a school, let's make it real - let's have schoolkids'. As an audience, ask yourselves, outside the West End, when was the last time you saw a professional touring play with real young people in it? Would it be possible? How would it work?
Because we believe the issues are so important, we were also hoping that these young people would be a bridge between us and new audiences - parents, teachers, governors, from local schools and colleges, who may not make a habit of seeing touring studio theatre, but for whom the play will resonate enough to change that, and hopefully foster a more general theatre-going interest thereafter.
Safe to say - all these hopes were realised, and then some. We sold out across eleven performances across Cornwall, and the responses were staggering. Here's just one audience member's response:
"The wonderful, no doubt intentional, irony of this cracking play is the fact that its central message - that our schools are a broken irrelevance in the age of social media - was contradicted by the superb performances of the students who are its product! The kids weren’t just all right, they
were amazing. The opening scene where Miss Jessop’s class descends into chaos was performed with such discipline and control that this deafish old man could hear pretty well every line of the overlapping quips and insults and I know enough about the business to recognise that achieving this involves serious work. So well done Jude and Maya and Skyla and Esme and Deva and Thivinya and Finlay and Robbie and Beck - a star ensemble and a brilliant achievement! Jasmine and Immy were given time to flesh out their characters and offered compelling portraits of tortured, unhappy teenagers and the adults were equally convincing reluctant inhabitants of whichever circle of hell secondary school teachers are allotted.
If it wasn’t for this wonderful team the lasting taste of the play would be dispiriting. I spoke to an audience member in the interval who said that in her experience as a grandmother Runt was a pretty accurate picture of a Cornish secondary school. And yet... if those same schools can produce something like this there is a glimmer of hope - and Pipeline deserves a little credit for finding it."