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.

In the theatre business the play is a legend, having launched the careers of several pimply actors in their very first jobs, including Kenneth Branagh, Rupert Everett,  Daniel Day-Lewis and Colin Firth. Originally it ran for an epic 19 months in the West End (next-door to another tale of public-school japes set in the same period, Daisy Pulls It Off) before a long tour. Funny and sad, the intensely English play hit a chord, evoking public-school life and showing two subversive boys wrecking it.

‘I wrote it,’ says Julian Mitchell, now a spry and entertaining 79-year-old, ‘immediately after Mrs Thatcher’s denunciation of Anthony Blunt, who was in hiding with some friends of mine. Everyone said how it was easy to be a communist in the 1930s — the hunger marches, the unemployment, etc. — but there’s a huge difference between being left-wing and actually wanting to betray your country.