Class Enemy (play) Class Enemy (play) Class Enemy is a 1978 play by the British playwright Nigel Williams which premiered at the Royal Court Theatre. Class Enemy was written in 1978 as a social commentary on the apathy and anarchy in inner city British schools, is adapted to the new European reality at the beginning of the 21st century. The set is a bleak classroom with broken tables and chairs, dirty blackboard and lit with sterile fluorescent lamps. The play starts with six students waiting for a teacher and, like Samuel Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon, they seem to wait in vain. What the
Samuel Beckett though he in fact broke off from the existentialist movement and founded his own philosophy). Though many of the themes are similar, Beckett had little affinity for existentialism as a whole. Broadly speaking, the plays deal with the subject of despair and the will to survive in spite of that despair, in the face of an uncomprehending and incomprehensible world. The words of Nell—one of the two characters in "Endgame" who are trapped in ashbins, from which they occasionally peek their heads to speak—can best summarize the themes of the plays of Beckett's middle period: "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,