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Given the
classrooms in The History Boys, it’s small
wonder certain Englishmen recall their
adolescent schooling with something akin to
lust. What with serenading each other with
Rodgers and Hart ballads, and quoting W.H.
Auden and Rupert Brooke—and all without
shame for their same-sex flirtations, well,
frankly, who wouldn’t yearn to return to
such halcyon days?
Alan Bennett’s play, now a film with the
original cast and director, recalls an
almost-mythical place in Eighties
Thatcherite England where the threat of
Clause 28 (which banned the “promotion” of
homosexuality in any British classroom) and
the specter of AIDS never intrude upon a
rosy-eyed and purple-prosed vision of the
world. The boys in Bennett’s world are
nearly a world apart from Nathan, the
nymphomaniacal student in Queer As Folk:
more ambitious, more driven, and seemingly
more entitled, and, therefore, far more
likely to remain connected to their schools
than to the nightclubs they might ultimately
frequent.
Somewhat archetypal (the fat boy, the
Lothario, the shy one, the poor one), each
of Bennett’s boys, nonetheless, achieves a
kind of individuality, and particularly when
alongside their teachers, wonderfully played
by Richard Griffiths and Frances de la Tour.
As much about pedagogy as it is about the
boys’ pursuit of acceptance at Oxbridge,
Bennett’s work highlights the myriad ways in
which knowledge is accrued—and the
unquestionable import of good teaching to
the final result.
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