Education, Education, Education | Axstane Players | June 2024

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Details

A4 Poster
A5 Flyer (Front & Back)
1:1 Square Social Graphic (4 variants)
Web Banner
Physical Banner (155 × 90cm)
Production Images

Education, Education, Education
by The Wardrobe Ensemble Axstane Players Farningham Village Hall June 2024

Overview

Education, Education, Education is a verbatim theatre piece by The Wardrobe Ensemble, a play about growing up in the 1990s under Blair's Britain, told through the memories of a generation shaped by Cool Britannia, the National Curriculum, and a world that felt like it was finally changing. The brief required marketing that could communicate that very specific cultural moment, not generically retro, but unmistakably, precisely 1990s, while building genuine social engagement in the weeks leading up to the show.

The main poster takes its visual cue directly from the political imagery of the Blair era, the bold red rectangle, the stark white italic sans-serif, the repeated triple title hammering like a campaign slogan. The chalkboard background, scattered with hand-drawn classroom doodles, roots the design firmly in the school experience at the heart of the play. The tagline 'things can only get better', lifted from the D:Ream song that became the anthem of the 1997 Labour landslide, does the work of communicating the entire era in five words. No explanation needed for anyone who lived through it.

Three distinct social graphics were produced, each transporting the audience into a different corner of the 1990s experience. The school locker graphic, blue painted metal, taped-up notes, Spice Girls and Beckham cuttings, recreates the intensely personal world of a teenager's locker door, show information written as if in biro on torn notebook paper. The cassette tape graphic places the show title on a hand-labelled tape sitting on a school desk scattered with pencils, instantly recognisable to anyone who made a mixtape. The Windows 95 desktop graphic reframes the ticket announcement as a system notification popup, complete with axstaneplayers.exe desktop icon, a "Buy Tickets" button, and a cursor hovering over it, the kind of image that stops a scroll completely because it looks exactly like something you'd have seen on a family computer in 1996. Each variant tells the same story through a completely different 90s lens, rewarding audiences who saw multiple posts rather than simply repeating the same image.

The production was directed and set designed by William Fifield, with the visual world of the stage drawn directly from the same cultural reference points as the marketing campaign. The set centred on two freestanding wooden-doored school room flats on castors, functional, flexible, and deliberately institutional, framed by blue painted walls lined with framed school portrait photographs, and Union Jack bunting strung across the full width of the space throughout. The noticeboard between the doors was dressed with authentic period detail: hand-made notices, Roy Lichtenstein references, bully awareness posters, and school trip permission slips that rewarded close audience attention. The ceiling grid, lit from within, shifted from cool clinical blue to burning red and warm amber to carry the emotional temperature of each scene, from the fluorescent mundanity of a 1990s staffroom to the hellish red of the play's more surreal sequences. The same space served as classroom, staffroom, theatre stage, and medieval battleground across the course of the evening, with costume and light doing the work of transformation rather than set changes. The design deliberately kept the school environment ever-present, even when the action became fantastical or heightened, the doors, the bunting, and the noticeboards remained, grounding every flight of imagination back in the institutional world the characters could never fully escape.

Design for the Stage