a long review (for textophiles) from the times literary supplement.
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Alan Bennett's private history
Keith Miller
10 June 2004
THE HISTORY BOYS
Alan Bennett
Lyttelton Theatre
The cast of Alan Bennett’s new play, The History Boys, certainly fulfils the cardinal rule of schoolroom dramas, in that none of them looks a day under twenty-five. But since the main questions posed by the play have to do with the corruptibility of the adolescent, it may well be that real school-age actors would have been whisked out of the rehearsal room by Social Services before a line was spoken.
The two forms of corruption in question conform neatly to Descartes’ mind–body split. We are at a Northern grammar school, during an enigmatic historical moment which is probably meant to correspond to the 1980s (of which more later). A talented multicultural history class regroups for its seventh-term Oxbridge entrance tuition, which the students approach in an attractive spirit of vague, inchoate desire. They soon find themselves the subject of a pedagogical battle between the results-obsessed headmaster and their beloved Hector (Richard Griffiths), who has filled their heads with exquisite thoughts (a suspicious number of which derive from Auden and Housman) on the strict understanding that they derive no practical benefit from his efforts. Enter Mr Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore), a young supply teacher, who finds in these well-stocked but disordered minds the perfect incubator for his exam strategy – which is to say anything, however provocative, unprincipled or untrue, that may titillate the jaded palette of the examiner.
Of course, it is usual for school stories to be about something a shade saucier than whether question-spotting or comparing Henry VIII to Stalin in one’s university exams might be a good idea. Here, the seasoning is sexual. The class is a hotbed of homosexual intrigue, the main object of which, Dakin (Dominic Cooper), is also the only student with a named girlfriend, a good example of how unequally Nature apportions her treasures during adolescence. Hector, meanwhile, numbers among his many eccentricities a penchant for frottage (“cradling”, is his rather fine word for it). This he pursues while giving lifts to students on a powerful motorcycle, glimpsed in a series of garishly-soundtracked video clips which serve to brighten up Bob Crowley’s somewhat dour set. The boys take all this in their stride, so to speak – at any rate, no posse of angry parents arrives to string Hector up by his matching tie and handkerchief. But when news of it leaks out, the balance of power shifts fatally – if, in the short term, expediently – towards Irwin.
The play is a curious mixture of comic, political, philosophical and melodramatic elements which only sometimes mesh. The dialogue is, as usual with Bennett, fine-tuned, arch and bitter-sweet, self-conscious (“I have not hitherto been allotted an inner voice”), clearly as great a pleasure for the actors as the audience. On repression and unfulfillment he is as good as Larkin: Hector’s rueful admission that he has made his advances to the boys ridiculous in order to protect himself from the possibility of any real emotional engagement is especially affecting. Then there is that alertness to the humorous possibilities of place-names which has never served an English writer ill. When the redoubtable Mrs Lintott (Frances de la Tour) recollects that Durham was where she had her first pizza, the line dances on a tightrope between comedy and pathos. And though it is plainly middle age which he does best, Bennett manages to equip the boys with a punchy vernacular which is more than equal to the play’s complexities, even if they are not, in most respects, terribly “vernacular” boys.
Set among the various emotional and intellectual intrigues being played out is a series of obiter dicta on the nature of history. The least refined comes from Rudge (Russell Tovey), whom we are meant to have characterized as thick because he plays sport and has a strong accent. Adapting a line from Frank Ward O’Malley, he calls it “just one ****ing thing after another”. This gets a big laugh – and it’s probably no worse as a definition than mirrors by the roadside. Rudge’s point, did he but know it, is that heavy decisions are often not seen as such at the time, and are taken lightly; that important and irrevocable things happen as much by accident as by design. Put that way, there is almost no such thing as “history” at all – certainly the moral importance which Tacitus or Carlyle might have imputed to it is moot – so there is really no reason not to play mind games with one’s examiners if some advantage may thereby accrue. Elsewhere, Mrs Lintott delineates a feminist model of history as a procession of women clearing up men’s mistakes. This gets a big laugh, too, even if one of the biggest pie-throwers in the pantomime that has been British education over the past two decades was the not entirely male Margaret Thatcher. But, this particular school being untouched by what Larkin called “the invasion of women”, Mrs Lintott’s plaint doesn’t get much in the way of further discussion. It is the accident theory, the one-****ing-thing-after-another theory, which is most important. We see it realized during a beautifully choreographed scene in which a cobweb-thin chain of causes leads to catastrophic effects – death for one character, paralysis for another.
The problem with the play’s rather more local history is that you cannot quite work out when and where it is supposed to be set. The action must be dated before the end of seventh-term Oxbridge admission, but after the advent of league tables – a distinctly unAristotelian window of around minus three years, if memory serves. The boys themselves resist accurate dating as fiercely as the Turin Shroud; they memorize show tunes and scenes from old movies, but seem only to know one pop record. Certainly they are alarmingly well-informed, and behaved, for anyone who’s been to any kind of school this side of the Festival of Britain. They sit in class crowned with no Walkman, sceptred by no Stanley knife. Nobody is afraid of seeming too clever in front of his contemporaries. They are more relaxed about their sexuality than seems entirely plausible outside the sybaritic end of the independent sector.
The nature of their ambition is hazy. You never really sense that they have to put coasters under their coffee-mugs to protect the varnish on the dinner-table, or that the only books in the living-room are a bible and an encyclopedia, or that they are made to buy trainers without logos – that particular cocktail of asceticism, paranoia and thrift which characterized the English petit-bourgeoisie at the time the action is ostensibly set. Yet they have the intellectual timidity of real grammar schoolboys. Knowledge must be a seamless mail shirt with which to joust against those richer or more well-born. The boys feel violated, initially at least, by Irwin’s prestidigitations, it being apparently unthinkable that two different teachers could say two different things and both be right, or worth learning from. In fact, what the play seems to show is a class from Bennett’s own generation, transposed, not always smoothly, to a more recent era, like a jazzed-up Rigoletto. It may be that the play is an elegy for the grammar school system, one of many mainly good things in British society to have been ground away between the Left and the Right.
One of its most emphatic arguments is this: it is somehow objectionable that grammar schoolboys need to learn to think more like public schoolboys if they want to get along. Yet what does that matter if nothing means, or causes, anything? Bennett, having toyed with our notions of history, goes on to confound our ideas about Oxbridge (the merits of which are otherwise taken for granted in the play, the revelation that Irwin has lied about his own university being just another sort of vindication). Rudge, perhaps the least bright student, and by some margin the least comfortably middle-class (the Asian and Afro-Caribbean boys are much more twinkle-toed), is also the only one to benefit from out-and-out nepotism, his father having worked as a college servant. Whether this is an example of accident or determinism, and whether it is to be excused or deplored, Bennett does not say. Rudge is a sympathetic character, and, we sense, not as slow-witted as the comical exigencies of his part compel him to seem.
But his case would undermine the meritocratic claims of a prestigious university as surely as any cretinous armiger or nabob’s idiot son. Of course, plenty of people have argued that meritocracy is not always a good thing. But the traditional alternative in Britain has always been a kind of feudalism. At times in The History Boys, it seems as though Bennett is confusing deference with virtue. In occasional glimpses of the characters’ future lives, and especially in the finale, we anyway see that the school displays the true characteristics of a provincial grammar school less in the number of students it manages to shoehorn into elite universities than in the rather prosaic people (a lawyer, a broadsheet hack, two headmasters, an architect, a builder, a clinical depressive) they become once they’ve been there.
Foretastes of Irwin’s later career as a media intellectual and policy wonk must be meant as a comment on the usefulness of lying (and not just to examiners). But surely it is sentimentality, not casuistry – leaders who claim to feel our pain, the emblazoning of hearts on sleeves as a substitute for debate and argument – which corrupts our public discourse most fatally. The intellectual finessing about which Bennett seems so worried might equally be seen as a sort of vulcanization of the mind, offering a student some intellectual distance from the coal-face of his (or her) subject. It was also surely a sign of the times in which the play is officially set – an ambitious young teacher in the 1980s might well have tried a morsel of Foucault on a talented history class, for example. Perhaps a little casuistry, like a little frottage, need do nobody any harm.
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Bad Education (2004) (Read 39,586 times)
