As we all know, the Cameron-Clegg-Osborne triumvirate all went to private schools with fees now higher than the average annual wage. With half the cabinet going to fee-paying schools, arguably there is again a need to eavesdrop behind the stained glass and panelled walls of private academe to understand its mojo, its methods, and its monsters – where best business is done with scandal kept firmly under the mat.

In 1981, playwright Julian Mitchell hit on the perfect excuse to plunder his own experiences at Winchester College to reveal a world obsessed by its own customs, hierarchies and hypocricies. Two years previously Anthony Blunt, educated at Marlborough College, had been exposed as a Soviet Spy. His homosexuality was paraded as part of a negative narrative. In Another Country Mitchell avenged himself of his own stifling experience at school to look back into the 1930s public school mindset, the Petri dish that served up the likes of Burgess, Maclean and Philby as well as Blunt, all privately educated, all of them Soviet spies, and all either homosexual or bi-sexual.Mitchell’s play, as staged here, offers no great dramatic effect, other than from some effective but sometimes melodramatic sound design by Fergus O’Hare. Boys talk to each other in various rooms, which develop ingeniously from a stark box-like space. The real action, we learn, is happening somewhere else – the sexual trysts in the school grounds, a suicide in the school tower, and a six-of-the-best beating that we hear, but do not see.

Earnestly as this cast attempts to draw us in to their claustrophobic angsts about their characters’ reputations and pecking order within the school, there is little in the way of a gear change. There is something monochrome about the proceedings and the performances, broken only by the arrival of Uncle Vaughan (Julian Wadham), who oozes smarmy charm and intellect. It is only near the conclusion, when Judd (Will Attenborough) and Bennett (Rob Callender) really start some verbal fisticuffs, pitting the arguments for love and ideology against one another, that a few sparks begin to fly. At last we are exposed to the alienated young hearts that are surviving despite the humiliations heaped upon them by their colleagues, and by a system that cares little for anything vaguely alternative.

Another Country politely exposes a world of teenage male sexual and political awakening but lacks the passion and darkness of Lindsay Anderson’s If, and the humour of Alan Bennett’s History Boys. The world has moved on since the 1980s, let alone the 1930s. Boys are no longer beaten at school, and the independents are anxious to develop their outreach schemes, as well as bursary provision for academically gifted pupils without the means to attend. Butthe play does serve as a reminder that the school-tie still matters, and is still firmly wrapped around ideas of Queen and country.   Robert Hilton