It looks and feels like a classic, not just a Russian classic, but an English schoolroom classic like something by RL Stevenson or William Golding or John Le Carré.
If her classroom looks less like a traditional schoolroom and more like a den — with a colorful rug and inspirational signs exhorting children to "DREAM" and "LAUGH" — that is no accident.
There is no schoolroom tradition in Britain like the one in the United States, where students salute the flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
Sitting at a communal table in a space remodeled to look like a schoolroom with diner accents, Mr. Dufour said: "I love horse, but I'm not going to start killing my neighbor because he doesn't want to eat horse.
The entire show takes its cue from this, with scene changes like the schoolroom and outdoor gardens all suggested with a few hanging pillars and other modest decorations.
The décor is minimal, like a chic Chelsea schoolroom: whitewashed walls, pale grey-green wooden slats like the backdrop of a Hammershoi painting, wood and marble flooring, chrome lamps, gleaming glassware.
It has been pointed out, for example, that the great majority of gun crimes in America have nothing to do with schoolroom or movie-house massacres or the like.
Despite such alarming sentences as "very interesting things happen when igneous rocks intrude into sedimentary rocks", Coyle's expertise ensures that the excitement and engineering skill behind such necessary schoolroom groundwork spill out constantly, like a lava flow.
The show includes one heraldic image of two swinging batters, white and pink, with colored bunting looped across the top of the picture and two rectangles representing dugouts, inside which chairs are lined up like seats in a schoolroom.
