The History Boys (West Yorkshire Playhouse)

Alan Bennett’s commercially most successful play came home to Leeds to provide a disappointingly thin Monday night audience with a typically thought-provoking dissertation on adolescence, education and sexuality.

The play is set in a Sheffield grammar school in the 1980’s (I enjoyed the inter-scene bursts of hits from then) where a group of boys are determined to get into Oxbridge, despite the recent lack of success on that front. One of Bennett’s themes is to discuss the different approaches to education, as personified by Lintott, Hector and the supply teacher Irwin. Lintott is the traditional dates/kings/wars history teacher, Hector a maverick who includes popular films and French by role-play and Irwin the steely-eyed professional who coaches purely to get through the Oxbridge exams and interviews.

The boys themselves are a rainbow coalition of religions, heterosexual, homosexual and not sure, and range from the posh to the working-class. But Bennett’s touch is sure enough not to let you think that the characters are just two-dimensional mouthpieces.

The boys continue their coaching from Irwin (who admits he didn’t actually get to Oxbridge himself) and after initially disliking his style gradually come to appreciate what he is doing for them as their best hope of a glittering university career. Of course, they still like Hector’s lessons best, although when he gets them to act out a brothel scene to improve their French they have to do some hasty improve when the headmaster walks in.

Hector’s days are numbered however, when the real reason for his habit of giving boys a lift on his motorbike (I won’t go into details) is discovered accidentally by the headmaster’s wife and he is asked to leave. Luckily for him, the sexually active boy in the group, Dakin, is enjoying trysts with the headmaster’s secretary. The fact that the headmaster chases her round the desk occasionally is used to blackmail him into letting Hector stay. Hector celebrates by taking Irwin for a ride on his bike but unfortunately Irwin is crippled in a subsequent crash and becomes a TV historian in a wheelchair. Bennett clearly loathes that type (TV historians, not people in wheelchairs). I do recall being warned at uni about historians who have a book to sell.

All the boys are accepted, even no-hoper working class Rudge, whose is good at rugby and whose dad was a porter at the college. Rudge describes history as “just one effing thing after another” in the play’s best one-liner, I think Bennett’s point is networks still trump enthusiasm and ability.

There are the usual cheap jibes at redbricks (as a working class boy from Armley who went to both Oxford and Cambridge I suppose Bennett feels entitled to sneer) but generally there is the usual mix of witticisms and some even-handed analysis of social issues, so well worth visiting if you can.