Theatre: why the time is right to revive Alan Bennett's The History Boys

A new production of The History Boys showcases all of Alan Bennett’s flair, wit and nuance, Seán Linnen, director of the touring show, tells Mark Fisher

The History Boys was not the first play Seán Linnen ever saw, but it was the first to make him sit up and take note. As a teenager, this comedy by Alan Bennett, set in a boy’s grammar school in Sheffield, was revelatory. It made him realise it was possible for a play to be funny, smart and, crucially, to speak to him about his own life. “This is what theatre can be,” he thought.

That is why, as Linnen built his career as a director, with a CV that stretches from London, Nottingham and Chichester to the Edinburgh Fringe, The History Boys was the play he longed to stage. Clocking that the 20th anniversary of its debut at the National Theatre was approaching, he wrote to Bennett to suggest a revival. It was surely time for the Olivier award-winning play, once voted the nation’s favourite, to have a new airing – not least because Bennett was about to turn 90.

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“Alan has been wonderful,” says Linnen. “We’ve had big conversations about the play, the casting and his experience of the original production. He came into rehearsals and told an amazing story about going to Cambridge for the first time to sit the entrance exam. He’d come from Leeds, where everything was grey or black, then he arrived at Cambridge and there was a frost on the lawn and he just thought he was in a magical wonderland. That’s what the boys are experiencing in the play.”

Lewis Cornay-Posner-Curtis Kemlo-Lockwood in the revived production of The History BoysLewis Cornay-Posner-Curtis Kemlo-Lockwood in the revived production of The History Boys
Lewis Cornay-Posner-Curtis Kemlo-Lockwood in the revived production of The History Boys

Set in the early 1980s, Bennett’s play is about a class of bright state-school pupils who have been selected to sit the Oxbridge entrance exam. Behind the laughs (a whole scene set in a bordello and performed in French) lies a provocative discussion about the purpose of education.

Is it all about ticking boxes and getting grades, as the headmaster, Felix Armstrong, would argue? Should it be about knowledge for its own sake, as Hector, the maverick English teacher, proposes? Or is it about gaming the system and playing the contrarian, as Irwin, the young history teacher, insists?

“I did war poetry in my English A Level and I don’t think anybody asked me what my opinion was,” says Linnen. “If young people now get to write about Kae Tempest, are they asked what they think about Kae Tempest’s writing or are they just told?”

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In the hands of a lesser playwright, a discussion about education could have been dry. But Bennett never lets it seem so, partly because everyone who has been through the school system will have an opinion about it. “It asks what is education for and who is it for,” says Linnen. “Here are these boys who are almost all working class and there is this idea that maybe they can go to the most elite educational establishments in the world. Now those routes aren’t as clear.”

He adds: “Even though it’s centred on university, there is so much in it about exploring who you are. What is beautiful is it does it intergenerationally: you see the older teachers struggling with who they are and then you see the boys doing the same.”

Produced by the Theatre Royal Bath, the touring production throws 1980s favourites from Adam and the Ants, OMD and Duran Duran into the mix. The play’s sense of time, however, is slippery. It made its debut 20 years ago, but it is set 20 years before that and has aspects more akin to Bennett’s own schooling in the 1950s. The playwright makes reference to cultural figures such as WH Auden, AE Housman and Wilfred Owen, as well as movies such as Brief Encounter, all of which would have been understood by the post-war generation. Contrastingly, there is little to root the play specifically in the 1980s.

It is as if The History Boys stands out of time, not least in its wish-fulfilment portrayal of Posner, a boy whose homosexuality is accepted by his classmates who show none of the homophobia characteristic of the age. “It feels like Alan both reaching back to the world he was brought up in and reaching forward and going, ‘This is what we want to aim for,’” says Linnen. “I remember seeing that as a gay teenager and going, ‘Oh, it’s possible. There’s a world out there where you can feel loved, held and seen.’ Maybe it wouldn’t happen, but it’s our job as artists to imagine another world.”

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More contentious, 20 years after the play’s debut, is the behaviour of Hector, a teacher whose treatment of his students would now be regarded as sexual assault. He is initially sacked for it in the play, but there is also an ambivalence about how serious it is. Linnen says this is one reason for using 1980s pop music in the production: “I didn’t want anyone to feel like it was 2024. Hector’s groping of the boys, the way everyone reacts and the way there is a cover up by the headmaster is rooted in the 1980s. It’s not that it forgives it, but it adds some context about why it was allowed to happen.”

In this way, The History Boys raises tricky questions and resists simple answers. “The play is a big call for nuance,” says Linnen. “We shouldn’t want our culture or our politics to be easily digestible. It doesn’t help. At the heart of the play is this yearning for a society where we can have bigger conversations about everything.”

The History Boys, His Majesty’s Theatre, Aberdeen, 22-26 October.

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