(You need to Login or Register to view media files and links)The truth behind the History Boys
(Filed: 21/06/2004)
<font face="arial, helvetica, sans serif">Alan Bennett's new play The History Boys has received rave reviews – and caused a meltdown at the box office.
As it continues in repertory at the National Theatre, the playwright and his director Nicholas Hytner held a platform discussion. Here, in this edited version of their conversation, they reveal the highs and lows of taking a play from a supermarket aisle to the stage.</font>
<u>Nicholas Hytner</u> -<b>It would be fair to say that when he is writing a new play Alan Bennett doesn't just keep his cards close to his chest – they're glued there. We live quite close to each other so I see him often in the food aisles at Marks & Spencer and have nagged him relentlessly, ever since I came back to the National, for a new play.
And about six months ago I ran into him cycling along to the shops and he said he might have something for me in a couple of weeks. I had no idea what he was going to write about. Never do. So the first question is, why did you write it?</b>
<u>Alan Bennett</u> - I think I started writing it about 18 months ago and I can see that, of the three teachers in the play, I've had experience of two of them. I'd been taught at my own school in Leeds by somebody like Mrs Lintott, in a very straightforward, factual way.
And then the way I got a scholarship to Oxford and how I got my degree really was via the method the character called Irwin uses in the play. So in a sense, I am Irwin. The person I have had no experience of at all is Hector, the charismatic teacher; I only knew about teachers like that from talking to other people, and also from reading.
Temperamentally I cleave to that kind of teacher and that kind of teaching – while at the same time not thinking it practical. I suppose that the three teachers came out of trying to reconcile that. I think plays do tend to come out of things that you can't actually resolve other than by writing a play about them. Though I'm nervous about going too much into how these things work because I'm frightened they might not work the next time.
<u>NH</u> - <b>I think the play has generally been taken to be an unequivocal endorsement of Hector and his approach. It never felt like that to me. I think most parents would be, to a certain degree, dubious about a teacher who had absolutely no regard for results.
You'd be more likely to support the headmaster's obsession with getting your children into university. The play is intellectually even-handed. There is nothing in it that says Hector right, Irwin wrong, Mrs Lintott wrong – and yet emotionally, it veers the other way.</b>
<u>AB</u> - I think, of the three teachers, Stephen Campbell Moore, who plays Irwin, has the hardest job because he doesn't have the audience's sympathy until two thirds of the way through the second act.
Both Hector and Mrs Lintott have the audience on their side whereas he – who is teaching and getting results, which, in the ordinary way, parents would approve of – is not thought to be sympathetic until he reveals himself as quite vulnerable. That came as a surprise to me when I saw it rehearsed. In a sense, it takes the actors to show you what you've written.
<u>NH</u> - <b>For those who haven't seen the play, Hector is the teacher who has no programme, who believes, to quote Housman, "all knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest human use".
Mrs Lintott believes that what the boys require is a firm foundation of fact. Irwin is the teacher brought in to get the boys into Oxbridge. He considers the truth to be something that can be manipulated to impress examiners and regards culture, poetry, art to be commodities that you can buy into to spice things up. That is essentially the ideological battleground of the play. So, do you think there is such a thing as absolute historical truth?</b>
<u>AB</u> - I don't know. That's one of the reasons why I wrote the play. In the words of Rudge in the play, "History is just one crappity smacking thing after another," which seems quite a brutish thing to say but was actually not said by him originally, but by Herbert Butterfield who was Professor of History at Cambridge in the '40s, only as he put it:
"History is one bloody thing after another." The difference between the "bloody" and the "crappity smacking" is what has happened in public discourse in the last 50 years. The thing that struck me is that on the first night, we had a fire which set the sprinkler system off.
At the end of that afternoon we had had our final notes session and everybody was in an up-beat mood because we'd had a week of very good previews, and I think Nick said, exactly as somebody says in the play, "Oh, nothing can go wrong now."
Then within a hour you came into the theatre and the stage was six inches deep in water. So, just as happens in the play, events took us by surprise. And I don't get much further than that. History is one bloody thing after another.
<u>NH</u> - <b>What about the other much debated topic in the play, the use of literature. Is it really enough to know literature by heart, or does literature provide us with something more practical?</b>
<u>AB</u> - I think everybody wants to have learnt poems by heart at school. They look back to an age when their parents, or maybe their grandparents, could recite verse. My mother could recite very garbled and over-dramatised bits of poetry she'd learnt at school.
And whenever she went into poetry-reciting mode, the pose she took up was exactly the one she'd taken up when she was 10 years old. But people do feel that they ought to have this ingrained knowledge of poetry and regret not having it. It seems to me, in Hector's words, it is a kind of "insulation for the mind".
And when you do come across people who have literature at their fingertips and can quote things off by heart, then it is very impressive and enviable.
<u>NH</u> - <b>But Hector is not the most brilliant English teacher. He uses quotations that are not particularly apposite when he is in trouble, and his assertion that you don't need to understand poetry to appreciate it seems dodgy at best.</b>
<u>AB</u> - I think it's true he's not an ideal teacher and he is sloppy and quotes stuff almost at random. But the boys see that. They see the shortcomings of Hector, Irwin and Mrs Lintott. I wanted to show that the boys are the ones who know more than any of the teachers.
They will go their own way and they will carve out their own futures. They will take from each of these teachers what they want. That's what the slightly less than idyllic last scene shows. The boys are not wholly nostalgic, nor are they wholly materialistic, and when they say what they've done in life, that is empiricism and experience winning through.
<u>NH</u> - <b>Many of the characters live in a state – which I find characteristic of your plays – of frustrated possibility. Scripps, Posner, Irwin and Hector all, to some degree, are waiting for life to happen.</b>
<u>AB</u> - I waited ages for that! Such criticism I've seen of the play is that I have put myself into it too obviously – and that I am Posner. But everybody watching the play says "I'm Posner" because he is the boy with a yearning, who seems to be getting nowhere and so is the saddest, and everybody sees themselves when young in that kind, protective way.
<u>NH</u> - <b>This seems to me peculiarly English. Americans have found it unbearable that Posner turns into what they call a loser. An English audience simply expects it! I had an email from a very smart American friend saying, "But he's put up with all this teasing at school, he's popular with the boys, surely he would turn into a TV director."</b>
<u>AB</u> - Well if he'd have been a writer, he'd be doomed as well! But perhaps it is all to do with the English will to fail. We were conscious, before the play started, that because we'd worked together successfully so much (including the film of The Madness of George III, this will be the fifth time), there was a tremendous feeling that now we were going to come a cropper.
You wouldn't get that in America. It's such an English feeling and I'm very often of that mind myself. And you must often get that with the National Theatre – the sense that you're having too good a time?
<u>NH</u> - <b>This is a terrible thing to admit. I feel guilty every time it's not a flop.</b>
<u>AB</u> - I've never had so much fun as rehearsing this play. We had a wonderful time. So by the time we came to the first preview, although how the audience took it wasn't actually irrelevant, at the same time you did feel you'd had such a good time, that was the important thing.
There was a lot of discussion before we started rehearsals proper about the themes of the play and the people and poets who are mentioned in it. If there's a lot of talk before rehearsal I generally get quite impatient, but this time I did think it was very valuable and it was a great contrast to my other school play, the first play I ever wrote, Forty Years On.
That was as stiff with literary references as this play is but in 1968 we made no attempt whatsoever to educate the boys about what was in the play. It was partly that in The History Boys the boys have to initiate the questions, so they have to know what they are talking about, whereas the boys in 1968 didn't. But it is also that the attitude to actors has changed since that time, and that they're accorded more respect now and are treated more humanely. So a play is much more of a co-operative enterprise.
<u>NH</u> - <b>We respected them a great deal more than they respected us.</b>
<u>AB</u> - The thing I liked the most was that at my age, they still treated me like a human being. You don't normally expect that from young people. I have to say, though, that being treated like a human being meant that they took the piss out of me relentlessly.
And never stopped. There wasn't a honeymoon period when there was a bit of respect, not to say veneration. There was never any at all. The first day, when I was coming in to the theatre, Dominic Cooper, who plays Dakin, was lounging in the stage door and someone said "What are you doing here Dominic?" and he said "Oh, I'm in this crap play about history by – what's the guy's name? Oh hello, Alan."
<i>Question from the floor How does the rehearsal period develop?</i>
<u>AB</u> - First of all we cut it quite a lot. After Hector has been given the sack at the end of the first act, I'd written a fairly ordinary classroom scene for the beginning of the second act and we found that wasn't taking the story any further.
I then had to rewrite that scene so that you felt that it was progressing. Maybe a better dramatist than I am would have imagined that, but I didn't see it.
<u>NH</u> <b> - One of the hazards of being a writer in the rehearsals is that the director and the actors can say, "This isn't working, Alan, can you rewrite it please?" Sometimes it's a good idea to stay home, which forces us to make what is written work. But in fact it was wonderful to have the writer there. </b>
<u>AB</u> - This sounds too cosy, but it requires forbearance, both on my part and on yours. Most directors would be nervous of having somebody there who chips in.
It's only because we've worked together a lot that we don't mind. And if it's going the wrong way, I just keep quiet for a bit. When I think of some of the stuff I said at rehearsals, I go hot and cold at the foolishness of it. I made such stupid suggestions. But if you've worked together before, you don't mind.
The thing that always impresses me is the courage of the actors. Before we actually started rehearsal, we had a read-through of the play in rough draft so that I could see how it did or didn't work, and then I could go back and do another draft.
We had a scratch cast which included four of the actors who actually ended up in the play. They'd never seen the play before and couldn't pronounce a lot of the names – the ideas were totally new to them – and in any other circumstances would have been making utter fools of themselves.
And yet they did it. This is why I get so infuriated by "luvvies" as a term. Actors are brave creatures really: they don't mind making a fool of themselves. And they're making a fool of themselves on my behalf and I find that immensely heartening.
<i>Q How does the theme of sexuality fit in with the theme of knowledge?</i>
<u>AB</u> - In the scene with the headmaster at the end of the first act, Hector doesn't really offer any defence for himself, except he starts saying, "The transmission of knowledge is in itself an erotic act. In the Renaissance…" and then the headmaster cuts him off.
The phrase actually comes from George Steiner – I asked his permission to use it – and it comes from his latest book called Lessons of the Masters. Steiner talks about the whole question of sexuality and teaching, and though I'd written the play before I'd read it I was heartened that some of the things – for instance the notion that Irwin's teaching is sexualised by the pupil who actually takes it all on board – wasn't just an idea I'd had, but can occur as part of the nature of teaching.
I realise that Hector laying hands on the boys would be totally different if they were much younger, but these are all 17-, 18-year-olds. I think I've been criticised for not taking this seriously enough. I'm afraid I don't take that very seriously if they're 17 or 18, I think they are actually much wiser than Hector. Hector is the child, not them.
<i>Q Is one of the boys more you than any of the other boys?</i>
<u>AB</u> - I was very religious as a boy and Nick assumed that I was Scripps, the religious one. But he's much more open-minded about it, more sceptical than I ever managed to be. So I suppose I'm closer to Posner.
A few critics who've disliked the play have accused me of parading myself in Posner. But I don't know how else you write plays apart from putting yourself into the characters. I'm all the boys except for Dakin, the most confident boy. I wish I could, but I can't see myself in him. And the masters too. I think all dramatists work like that. There's a pinch of you in every character.
However, I am like Posner for a particular reason and it goes right back to the origin of the play. The idea really began when Nick told me about his time at Manchester Grammar School where he had a very good voice and sang with the Hallé Orchestra under Barbirolli.
I always loved Barbirolli so that sounded to me wonderful. Nick was then on <a href="
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Private Passions, on Radio 3</a>, and I listened to this thinking he would talk about his early experience with Barbirolli. In fact he didn't, but he did play Ella Fitzgerald singing Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered with the original Lorenz Hart lyrics of "I'll sing to him/Each spring to him/And worship the trousers that cling to him" and I thought how good this would be coming from a boy with a crush on another boy, sung by a boy with an unbroken voice.
That took me back to my own childhood, because I was 16 when my voice broke. And so I started to write a play in which there was a boy with an unbroken voice who is longing for his voice to break, feeling quite out of it at school, very much as I did.
And then the final line of the play in an early draft was Posner saying, "It's not all bad news, my voice is breaking."
We talked about this and Nick said well, nobody's voice breaks at 16 nowadays.
<U>NH</u> - <b>Can I just say, that was one of the few times that we came close to a row, because Alan said you might just as well say that women don't burn their husbands' manuscripts and then go out and shoot themselves. And it doesn't invalidate Hedda Gabler. Which is true, I had to admit.</b>
<u>AB</u> - He said I know somebody who has a good voice who would be good in this part but it would have to be a broken voice. So slightly reluctantly I rewrote the part.
I can see Posner is a ghost of the part I would have written. Plays are full of ghosts like that, of ideas you've had and then changed, but it's seldom they turn out as happily as this one did.
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(You need to Login or Register to view media files and links)<u>Sentimental education: a scene from The History Boys</u>
'The History Boys' by Alan Bennett is published this week by Faber. The first 20 readers to order through Telegraph Books Direct will receive their copies absolutely free (allocated on a first come, first served basis). Thereafter it is available for £11.99 (usual price £12.99) + £2.25 p&p. To order please call 0870 155 7222 (Sat-Sun 9am-5pm; Mon-Fri 9am-7pm).
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Bad Education (2004) (Read 39,584 times)
