Bashir Lazhar

A substitute teacher’s lot is rarely a happy one: parachuted into situations not of their choosing, the butt of pranks from students who realise they’re unlikely to be around long, doomed to wander from school to school. Perhaps, without being too melodramatic, you could say that a substitute teacher is a bit like an asylum seeker – drifting in the interstices, searching but seldom finding a permanent home.

In Bashir Lazhar, Montreal writer Evelyne de la Chenelière takes this rather unlikely analogy and runs with it. The titular teacher, played with plenty of verve by Michael Peng, is an Algerian immigrant in Canada. In this one-man show, the consistently chalk-covered Mr Lazhar struggles to bring order to the lives of students whose previous teacher committed suicide in their classroom. His own internal life is also in tumult as he faces deportation back to the country where his wife and three children were murdered.    

Cory Sincennes and Jennifer Goodman’s giant chalkboard stage is a wonderful piece of set design and the lecture theatre setting, replete with paper airplanes on most desks, complements the play nicely. Unfortunately, while the culture shock premise is a strong one and the analogy between the substitute teacher and the asylum seeker arresting, the drama feels too chaotic and the plot unnecessarily obfuscatory. The curious decision to allow Bashir to deliver lines to invisible characters doesn’t help matters either. It’s a shame, as there are some gems in Chenelière’s script and enough innovation on stage to raise Bashir Lazhar above the Fringe humdrum.