Review: The History Boys

The History Boys by Alan Bennett, directed by Peter Evans. Design by Dale Ferguson, lighting by Toby Sewell, sound/music design by Ian McDonald. With Craig Annis, Michael Finney, Ben Geurens, Andre Jewson, Morgan David Jones, Brian Lipson, Rhys McConnochie, Luke Mullins, Matthew Newton, Beejan Olfat, Deidre Rubenstein and Ashley Zukerman. Melbourne Theatre Company @ the Victorian Arts Centre Playhouse until May 12.

Alan Bennett's The History Boys is British theatre's version of Harry Potter. It opened at the National Theatre in 2004 to rapturous reviews and audiences, and swept off to Broadway, where rapturous reviews and audiences followed in New York accents. A transfer to the West End was inevitable. It's won so many Oliviers and TONY awards that the glow can be seen over the horizon. Then, of course, they made the film.

And at last we get to see what the fuss is about. Of course there's no question that Alan Bennett, the British national treasure who has penned such classics as The Madness of George III and Talking Heads, can write a sentence. He writes very well indeed, with feeling and intelligence, even if - as Chris Goode points out in his acute meditation on this play - his true metier is television, not the theatre. But, despite an (almost) superb production, I can't say I like The History Boys. In fact, it's one of the most purely annoying plays I've seen in a long time. I fear that untangling my irritation will make this review very long, so be warned.

You can see at once why it's been so popular. The History Boys is artfully seductive work, consciously pressing (but not too hard) all the buttons that signal its cultural worth, while at the same time harnessing the tried-and-true techniques of theatrical entertaining. The bitter pill of poetry goes down here with a big dose of sugar, and the punters love it. Before I go on, let me explain that TN isn't one of those who sneer at the popular for its own sake; a goodly part of my life is spent whuffling around the louche pleasures of genre literature, and I'll be eating popcorn at Pirates of the Caribbean 3 the day it comes out. But, in the light of the superlatives that garland this play's arrival, it's worth remembering Brecht's comment that if everybody likes a show, something must be wrong.

The History Boys is set in a minor public (ie, private) school in northern England during the 1980s - although it is a rather strange 1980s, overlaid with strong overtones of the 1950s, when Bennett himself was a student - and concerns a group of bright, working class boys. They are the students of Hector (Rhys McConnochie), the eccentric-but-loveable English teacher, and the history teacher, Mrs Lintott (Deidre Rubenstein), a woman with a wit dryer than Melbourne's reservoirs. To bump his school up the league tables, the ambitious Headmaster (Brian Lipson) decides to bring in a brash young teacher, Irwin (Matthew Newton), whom he hopes will give the boys enough polish to fast-track them into the cloisters of Oxbridge.

The new teacher is awkward but charismatic, and the boys' loyalties are divided between the old and the new. This allows Bennett to put differing notions of education at loggerheads. The conflict is between an Arnoldian notion of humanism, leavened with a bracing hostility to utilitarian ideas of culture, versus the amoral opportunists who see knowledge and education as merely a means to self-promotion and advantage. From the opening scene of the play, when a Blairite politician tells us that in order to preserve freedom we must sacrifice our liberties, it's clear that Bennett intends The History Boys to be a critique of contemporary Britain.

Hector is a familiar enough figure: he's the off-message teacher who inspires his boys (it's always boys) to a richer appreciation of life (and of course literature). He appears, sodden with nostalgia for doomed youth, in films like Goodbye Mr Chips or Dead Poets Society. Bennett's model is a little edgier than his precursors; Hector is disillusioned and flawed - he "fiddles" with the more attractive boys while scooting through town on his motorbike. He locks the door of the classroom to permit the boys to make camp re-enactments from classic Hollywood movies or - as in one of the purely funny vaudevillean scenes from the play - to practise their French by enacting scenes from a bordello. And they all quote reams of poetry - a select bunch dominated by Hardy, Houseman and Larkin. Of which more later.

The keen young blade Irwin, who is little older than the boys, offers a leaner, meaner view of culture, with a faultline of vulnerable hypocrisy - he is too intelligent not to perceive his own dishonesty. (He later becomes a television historian and, ultimately, the politician in the opening scene). Here, as a discussion about the Holocaust makes clear, there is no room for the autonomous or even sentimental value of education or art: they provide "gobbets" which one places artfully about one's cultural persona to catch the bored or inattentive eye. Irwin wouldn't argue with Sir Francis Bacon's claim that knowledge is power, but in the present age of celebrity he would add the rider that the key to exercising power is entertainment.

Bennett adds a novel twist by introducing the fissile question of the erotics of teaching. In the current climate, he is perhaps brave to raise it at all. The play acknowledges that the intimate act of teaching - the exchange between youth and experience - is electric with erotic energy. This is something that was openly acknowledged in the ideal of the Symposia, for example, and given explicit voice in Flaubert's A Sentimental Education, the story of a young man's affair with an older married woman. Where this erotic dynamic shades into abuse is something Bennett doesn't address at all: Hector's "fiddling" with the boys' genitalia is good-humouredly dismissed by everyone, except possibly Mrs Lintott, as a trivial question, a mark of Hector's foolishness more than anything else. Even the Headmaster makes it clear that, although it gives him an excuse to sack Hector, the real problem is elsewhere.

I don't remember the groper in my school being regarded so tolerantly by the students, although his furtive feel-ups of adolescent girls was perhaps as "harmless" as Hector's mild frottage; but then, he had greasy hair and bad dandruff and was a notably uncharismatic teacher. I do remember that the groping was regarded among the students with defensive, even savage, mockery, and that those students who suffered his attentions (this was the late '70s) were mostly distressed by their disempowerment. If authority chose to feel them up, they felt, rightly or wrongly, that they had no recourse, no right to object.

There is, unquestionably, something disturbing about Bennett's light treatment of this theme; minimising the implications of such behaviour was, as I recall, one of the major ways the Catholic Church dealt with the rampant sexual abuse among its priests. I'm not by any means looking for some hysterical denouncement of pederasty, but an acknowledgement at least of the darker complexities of Hector's actions would have made a more interesting play. But, let's face it, the erotics in this play, like its period dress, are a fantasy.

Bennett has given us a school where homosexual yearnings are openly accepted by the boys, and even the teachers, as normative. Among the students, the gay boy is Posner (Morgan David Jones). His hopeless crush on Dakin (Ben Geurens), the erotic focus of the play, is both universally acknowleged and, in a strange way, universally accepted, even by Dakin himself. No bashing of the queer boy in the toilets in this school; at worst, Posner suffers a little mockery, no worse than the playful hits over the head with magazines that in this world represents corporal punishment.

To reinforce this Platonic ideal, women exist on the margins. Aside from Mrs Lintott, the history teacher, there are no women on stage. They exist as shadowy axes of desire or undesire, the faded wives one never sees but from whose orbits husbands flee in order to fumble with the bright things of youth (although in the Headmaster's case, he's chasing his young secretary around her desk).

Mrs Lintott herself is, as she puts it, gender neutral: she is a comic figure who pops up sardonically to point out her own marginality, the fact that in order to exist in this world, she must forget that she is a woman. In her major speech she rails at the boys, asking them to consider how depressing she finds it to teach "five centuries of masculine ineptitude". This outburst presents an interesting revision of feminist protest. Mrs Lintott's complaint is that of the exasperated housewife: she is tired of being one of a long line of women who have historically followed men of action, "cleaning up their mess". The feminist argument is actually rather different: it claims that history has routinely erased the fact that women have contributed to the mess themselves.

These issues gesture towards the profound problems I have with this play. There is a certain disingenuousness in its argument that unravels its own overt propositions, which is seen most clearly in its discussions of education and culture. The History Boys sweeps along on a wave of sentiment that at once celebrates and laments the values of a humanist education, the Enlightenment idea of literature as a means of articulating and expanding the complexities of a felt and private inner life. Bennett explores this idea with a mitigatingly waspish scepticism: there's a line warning against the kind of middle-aged men who "love words", to whom literature is a wanly sensuous, vain adornment to an ultimately impoverished self.

Central is the assertion of the place of literature in making a "whole, rounded" human being. At the end of the first act is one of its most important scenes, in which Hector describes to Posner the sensation of discovering a writer who articulates your own inarticulate thoughts and feelings. "It's as if," Hector says, "a hand has come out and taken yours". This is a moving expression of what literature can mean to a young (and not only to a young) person; one thinks of the adolescent Susan Sontag, to whom her books were her "friends". But in Bennett's world it's clear that this sense of connection and liberation is rigorously circumscribed; it's a possible freedom that, like Hector's fiddling, goes only so far.

There's a lot of poetry in this play. I'm of a mind with Genet, who didn't approve of poetry in the theatre, but loved the poetry of the theatre; Bennett for the most part gets his poetic effect cheaply with static recitations, although there's one marvellous scene where the lines are distributed among the boys and a poem at last comes to theatrical life. But the wherefores of poetry's theatricality are not my concern here. In the course of the play, Bennett traces a very particular poetic heritage. It begins with Shakespeare, jumps to Thomas Hardy, AE Houseman, Rudyard Kipling, WH Auden and Wilfred Owen (with glances aside to Stevie Smith and TS Eliot) and culminates with Philip Larkin.

I have no objections to most of these poets, and fervently admire more than a couple of them. But this is a very recognisable genealogy which represents considerably less than the sum of its parts. And it's what it represents that concerns Bennett, and gives me pause. Shakespeare, with his unruly vitality, is the odd man out, and one suspects that his presence has less to do with the work itself than with Shakespeare's role as a noble emblem of British cultural pride. After Shakespeare, we are notably following poets who mostly work - in often masterly ways - a minor key. Thus we have Hardy and Houseman, but not a sign of Gerard Manly Hopkins; Auden but no place for WB Yeats or Dylan Thomas; Eliot but no Ezra Pound; Larkin, but none of his equally distinguished but more ambitious contemporaries - say, Peter Redgrove or WS Graham or Geoffrey Hill or Ted Hughes. And - naturally - only one woman, Stevie Smith, who happens, happily, to be a notoriously eccentric spinster.

Philip Larkin, the apotheosis of this line, in fact occupies an analogous space in British poetry to Bennett's in English theatre. He's the becomingly unassuming northern boy made good, whose brilliance never loses the common touch; an avatar, indeed, of "Little England". In The History Boys, Bennett traces a representative tour of conventional, middlebrow English cultural taste, of which his own work is a defining marker. And why not? I hear you cry.

It bothers me because of what it leaves out. In this cultural paradigm, qualities like passion, experiment, extremity, unruliness or risk are all - sometimes subtly, sometimes with the brute power of establishment marginalisation - carefully sidelined; they're smothered, ignored, mocked, appropriated or dismissed. This happens even when they occur in the canonical poets' work; in The History Boys, for example, the extremity of Owen's anguish about the First World War is undercut by an observation that, really, he loved the war, and couldn't wait to return to the front.

This is why, quite aside from the outrageous tearjerking Bennett permits himself at the end of The History Boys, his play is sentimental rather than an argument for the value of sentiment, a work that turns away from the challenge and beauty of art even as it purports to defend it. Even in the private sphere Bennett ascribes literature, its place is limited - its chief function is consolation. Literature might well be a consolation for the inconsolable implacability of living (though Samuel Beckett would have a bone or two with pick with that); the problem is that in Bennett's purview, that is also all it can be. There is not, and cannot be, any version of the challenge Rilke believed inherent in the experience of art: "You must change your life!"

It's a view of literature that is ultimately as repressive, as hostile to life and as self-serving as the political spin of Tony Blair. In fact, the apparently opposing arguments presented here seem to me to be on the same side of the same coin: the choice is between two identical shut rooms, the charms of each as meretricious as the other.

Enough of that, although there is, as always, more to say. The MTC gives it, as I said a long time ago, a superb production; squinting at the photos of the National Theatre show (ah, the wonders of Google), it seems to me that director Peter Evans has mounted this play with considerably more visual flair and imagination than the original. While the NT designer Bob Crowley went for a sense of detailed realism (albeit with shades of Lindsay Anderson's classic film If), zapped up with video footage of a school between scenes, Dale Ferguson has created an abstract, fluid space that evokes rather than describes the world of the school.

The action takes place exclusively forestage, and basic set elements - desks, tables and so on - are swung on rapidly by the cast between scenes, a decision which, aside from being practical, subtly achieves the sense of schoolroom chaos between lessons. The stage is bisected by a kind of grid, down which screens, mirrors and whiteboards can be slid to create a constantly changing counter-text to the action. Behind this grid climbs a series of broad steps, on which are placed softly lit desks. They are cunningly sized so the perspective appears as if the desks recede into the distance, and they create a lyrical visual backdrop. In the left hand corner of the front stage, in brutal contrast to the aesthetic unity of the rest of the set, is a huge white box with a door (it's the single "door" on the stage, and everyone enters and leaves through it). It wasn't me, I confess, who picked it as an industrial freezer, down to the door handle, but I'm certain that's what it is, a sardonic commentary on the coolroom that is the education system.

Evans moves his actors over this set with precision, variety and speed, ensuring the play never falters. And he has picked a marvellous cast; it's worth going to see it just for the performances. Matthew Newton as Irwin is a wonderful mixture of brash edge and vulnerability, inhabited by a knowing despair that manifests as cynicism; Brian Lipson's Headmaster is a tough northern businessman, motivated more by pragmatic interest than class snobbery, and that fine comic actor Deidre Rubenstein is - in the moments granted her - a scene stealer: dry, bitingly precise and very funny.

The boys are smart, funny and bursting with testosterone; there is not a weak performance among these young actors, although I particularly enjoyed Morgan David Jones' sensitively nuanced performance of Posner, and Luke Mullins as Scripps, the detachedly amused outside observer who will one day be a writer (or, at least, a journalist). Ben Geurens is clever, louche, dangerous and wickedly charismatic as the sexually precocious Dakin (where, I wonder, was that energy when he was playing Mr Sloane? - here he is an entirely different actor).

The only disappointment is the central performance. Rhys McConnochie is mystifyingly muted in the role of Hector, which requires something of the irresistible actorly ham of a Leo McKern or Richard Griffiths, who played this role in the original production. Sadly, McConnochie is totally outshone by the wattage of the other actors. Most of the touching (and crucial) scene about reading at the end of the first act - a scene which ought to generate pin-drop silence - is lost to the floor, and at other times McConnochie is even inaudible. As it's such an important role, his weak performance dims the lustre of the whole, which is otherwise a most enjoyable piece of theatre.

Aside from the play, of course.