NORTHERN Exposure, the BBC-backed festival of new writing, is in its third year. One play a week will be presented at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, giving first commissions to three Yorkshire writers, kicking off with Jodie Marshall, a writer with North Yorkshire roots.

She looks young enough to have been refused alcohol in Oddbins.

For her premiere commission, she "wrote what I knew about", her experience of working in inner-city primary schools.

Non Contact Time is staffed with the kind of characters that interested her: caring, self-sacrificing people - three teachers and a teaching assistant - who use black humour to defend themselves against the inevitable crushing sense of failure.

The setting is the end of the summer term in a Leeds primary school, where darkness creeps across what should be a light atmosphere in the staffroom.

Each teacher is sagging under the burden of ensuring the welfare of 300 children, and Marshall depicts a debilitating culture where motivation and belief in education is eroded by stress, exploitation and over-work.

Rhea Bailey (remember her from Pilot Theatre's Beautiful Thing and A/S/L at York Theatre Royal?) plays teaching assistant Miss Gravelstein, the self-effacing butterfly already broken on the wheel of education; David Smith's Mr Granger is the bright young hope but feels like a hamster on a wheel; Katarina Olsson's stick-in-the-mud Miss Archer joylessly sticks to the fallible "right procedures"; John Elkington's Mr Bowning is the embittered old pro with moods as foul as his staffroom language.

The staging is elementary, three doors and four boxes, but Alex Chisholm's cast pumps the broken heart and exposes the damaged soul of a play of its time: John Godber's Teechers for the age of Blair's education, education, education.

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Updated: 11:40 Thursday, May 19, 2005