The History Boys

Brilliant. The award winning play by Alan Bennett strikes gold with its talent cast and dry, school-boy wit. Set in a middle class English preparatory school, The History Boys describes the struggle of a class of gifted students in obtaining a place in Oxbridge via the noble art of deceit. This isn't the superficial deceit you find in cheating on tests, etc., rather, the boys spend months learning to fool the dons into thinking them remotely interesting people with fresh opinions, rather than the run-off-the-mill chaps from the other prep schools.

Hector pulls off the part of the stodgy, slightly perverted tutor beautifully, inculcating his love for unpretentious learning in the boys, while Irwin shades in the education system (and highlights its inherent shortcomings) with his New-Age techniques of essay-writing. Totty's character as the on-off feminist is rather cliché, being the only other woman on the cast (the other is a subsidiary character whose sole purpose is to be exploited for the plot line), and her role is played down as the competent but cynical female history teacher, certainly one of many across the globe. The boys characters are sometimes indistinct, all them forming one large voice, as it is, only spoken at different frequencies by different puppets. Individualism only comes into play with Posner's interactions with Irwin, and with Dakin's seduction of Irwin, a rather central character. Despite this lack of individualism, the camaraderie between the boys and their little in-class sketches of Brief Encounter, Now, Voyager, etc. are excellent, of course not as the characters within those films themselves but as re-enactors of the films.

The script itself contains many priceless one-liners that are telling of the prep-school environ as well as the acerbic English wit of the learned middle class. Bennett borrows from many old masters, including Whitman, Housman, and Hardy, whose poignant poetics lend a certain gravity to the theme of homosexuality and neatly balances the 'tosh' that is Gracie Fields and Brief Encounter. The parallel between Dakin's liberal giving of his body (to a multitude of adorers) and the boys' positively Faustian marketing of their personality to become part of the New Elect is a running motif, also reflected in Hector's and Irwin's sacrifice of their personal decency in caving to the temptation that is Dakin (amongst others). Rudge rescues in his own little way near the end when he reveals the system and society's subjugation of his self for their generic purposes.

Kudos to Stephen Campbell Moore for his sensitive portrayal of Irwin, as well as the rest of the cast for their nuanced performances that emote the unsaid with subtle grace.

Anon.