The History Boys

Published Wednesday 6 September 2006 at 15:05 by Richard Edmonds

The National Theatre’s touring production arrives trailing clouds of glory, and richly deserved it seems to me, since Alan Bennett’s incisive dialogue, which can take in anything from demented OAPs to (as here) male sixth formers fancying each other, their teachers or the head’s secretary is the very stuff of exciting theatre. Little wonder that the Rep has the ‘house full’ notices out.

However, praise apart, it seems to me that the first act still drags in an episodic manner. The reason may be that Bennett has contrived a set of sketches, reminiscent of the school maam joke numbers once a standby of British pantomime.

Notwithstanding this initial reserve, there is a great fun in the drolleries which fly around Bob Crowley’s brutalist, grey, neon-lit classroom set with its upstage back projection to move us along, as the students find fun in Sartre or existentialism and attempt to distance themselves objectively from the horrors of the Nazi death camps.

After the ice creams are over, Bennett takes us deeper into the predicament of the ageing, gay English teacher (Stephen Moore) who is forced to confront his unorthodox fumblings into the genitals of his bright young charges, along with the chillier new wave in teaching brought into the school by Irwin (Orlando Wells), a young supply teacher with dodgy credentials.

Bennett’s argument - and there is always an argument in a Bennett play - seems to concern the values of the older methods of teaching English, when pupils learned texts and were taught for life after university, with the contemporary style of cut and paste essay which gets you past the Oxbridge examiners, an end in itself, although patently skin-deep.

There is much humanity in this richly rewarding play and great scope for the actors. The moment when Irwin is propositioned by Dakin (Ben Barnes) one of the sixth formers who suggests a bit of casual Sunday afternoon fellatio, created a nervous silence in a packed auditorium that you could have cut with a knife. Stephen Moore is frequently inaudible but plays well, Mr Wells is fine and the boys are a riot. Special praise for Tina Gray who proves with only a couple of lines the old adage about small actresses and small lines.