THE HISTORY BOYS - ARTS THEATRE
Is History just a thing of the past? Indeed, has the past any relevance to our lives today and in the future? These issues and a ton more are the stuff that Alan Bennett’s dreams are made on. His 2004 play ‘The History Boys’ has hit Cambridge with a huge bang. The new production by the Theatre Royal Bath is an exploding firecracker of a theatrical treat. It combines Bennett’s immensely erudite, witty, moving and scandalous script with some beautifully choreographed scene changes and (unexpectedly) lashings of gorgeous close harmony singing.
The setting is Sheffield in the early 1980s – though Bennett’s world is never set in a clearly defined world of Thatcher, the miner’s strike or Duran Duran (though happily we hear the latter in a jolly pre-curtain scene-setting medley). The eponymous boys are pupils at a state secondary school and we first meet them as they receive their A level results. The lads as lads are obsessed with sex and getting into Oxbridge. Enter their ageing teacher Hector played with great presence by Simon Rouse as a sort of amalgam of King Lear and Prospero. He comic-tragic figure is a teacher of the very old school – and not the one he is presently employed in. To Hector, learning is about the culture of what used to be called without embarrassment, ‘Western civilisation’. He poured into the boys his vast knowledge of poetry, literature, chanson, and Gracie Fields. Yes, Our Gracie. Thanks to Hector the boys love to sing ‘Sing As We Go’ – and do so with vivacious harmonies. Hector’s lessons in the French subjunctive involve the boys playing out scenes in a Paris bordello. Thanks to him they can quote at length (and in context) Hausman, Hardy and Kipling. Thanks to Hector they have learnt to sing the Great American Songbook and can re-enact (complete with chalk dust for steam) the closing passage of ‘Brief Encounter’.
The question is, will any of this damned learning get ‘em into Cambridge? Not according to the Headmaster who can only appreciate education if it’s outcomes can be measured. Played by Milo Twomey, this head looks and sounds like a second-hand car salesman trying to flog a Morris Oxford or Austin Cambridge. He doesn’t get Hector and nor does the young teacher Irwin (Bill Milner) brought in to teach the boys ‘properly’.
The play has a multitude of layers and themes – some now and again preachily expressed and embedded in Bennett’s playbook. Characters suddenly address the fourth wall with some albeit beautifully crafted but didactic words. It is only in the second half of the play that Bennett’s pen turns from his entertaining but Wildean detachment to something more emotional.
We discover that Hector has a weakness for touching up the boys on his motorbike trips home. In this Me Too age it is a challenge not to condemn the fiddling teacher out of hand. But Bennett asks us to stand back and see the man behind the reprehensible actions. The boys take Hector’s sexual advances in their stride, but not so the head teacher. A price will be paid. The cast under the wonderful direction of Sean Linnen, balance this ying and yang of a play with consummate professionalism. The boys are utterly convincing: Lewis Cornay as the outsider Posner coming to terms, or not, with his gayness, Ned Costello as the ‘no hoper’ Rudge who has a trick or two up his uniformed sleeve. The cast sing beautifully and there are lots of songs to enjoy but nothing out of context. Scene changes are executed with balletic style – a joy to watch.
Bennett’s attack on modern education is not so much in anger but regret. There is always a deep sense of nostalgic loss in his work, a playwright holding on – just - to a disappearing England. Though its sexual politics still has the power to shock and maybe dismay, this long, sometimes unwieldy play has so much to teach us. And with this production, with its fluidity, energy and perfect casting, you will come away mightily uplifted and in awe of our national treasure who has just turned 90. I guess that soon, like each of us, Alan Bennett will be a history boy himself. But here with this captivating production we can still enjoy the fruits of his immense talent. History, says Bennett, is so much a thing of the present.
