Julian Mitchell on Another Country: ‘I based it on my fury and anger and I wrote it fast and it flowed’

Today’s top public schools are plush country clubs with superb facilities, lovely food, first-class teaching, no fagging, no beating and, one imagines, minimal sexual interference from the staff. Most even have things called girls. While excellent at turning out world-class actors, the public schools these days are far too nice and unbrutal to be of any use as dramatic material for a play.

Julian Mitchell’s play Another Country (1981) belongs to another era. It is a tale of sadistic, crumpet-munching prefects lording it over traumatised fags; homosexuality is rife and there’s brutal jockeying for position among the prefects — all good training for the cabinet jobs these teenagers one day expect to enjoy. It is set in the privileged school system of the 1930s that was briefly a crèche for budding Marxists and traitors. Now the hit play is coming back to London, to the Trafalgar Studios, having been revived to acclaim in Chichester last year.