The History Boys: A Play

The History Boys: A Play
by Alan Bennett

The History Boys: A Play
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Book Summary Information

Author: Alan Bennett
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-04-04
ISBN: 0571224644
Number of pages: 144
Publisher: Faber & Faber

Book Reviews of The History Boys: A Play

Book Review: Play of Ideas
Summary: 5 Stars

Although I work in the theater, I read this play with no thought of staging it, or even imagining it staged. It is just a pure play of ideas -- brilliant, intriguing, often funny ideas -- jostling together in a kind of imaginary space, with very little of the mechanics of stage-directions and settings. Indeed, although I am sure that Nicholas Hytner's original staging at Britain's National Theatre and again on Broadway must have been brilliant, the description of it in the foreword sounds cumbersome compared to the rapid shifts in time and place that can be taken for granted on the page. And the few minutes of the film version that I caught on television the other day just clogged the characters and situations with a lot of irrelevant detail you would not even have had on the stage. So read this play by all means, not as a stand-in for some other medium, but as an artwork in itself, as rich, free, and evocative as a poem.

This study of a group of sixth-formers (high-school seniors) studying for entrance examinations to Oxford and Cambridge perhaps meant more to me because I share some of the background. In a long personal introduction which is alone worth the price of the book, Bennett describes visiting the glittering fairyland of an ice-bound Cambridge in December 1951 to take his exams (though he ultimately went to Oxford). I made the same journey seven years later, but with significant differences. I came from a school that traditionally sent its pupils to Oxbridge whereas Bennett, like the characters in this play, came from a public high school in the North where such goals were less usual. I entered in the sciences (turning to the arts later) and remember little of any special grooming for success; Bennett's schoolboys are history majors, and their preparation goes way beyond cramming them with the facts, but presenting them as well-rounded young men with an original turn of mind.

These tasks in the play are entrusted primarily to two very different teachers. Hector (both his surname and nickname) teaches his acolytes behind closed doors, leavening a heady diet of English poetry with re-enactments of old movies; his classes are a smorgasbord of cultural references. He also mixes his pedagogy with a little pederasty, which is mostly tolerated by the boys who ride behind him on his motorcycle. The other teacher, Irwin, is a much younger man just arrived from Oxford himself. He has developed a technique for impressing the examiners by turning fixed ideas on their heads, and having just enough facts at one's fingertips to back up even such controversial positions. He suggests, for instance, that Britain got into the First World War for commercial advantage. "All this mourning," he says, "has veiled the truth. It is not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember." One of the most telling passages in the play comes when Hector and Irwin, now sharing a class, try to apply their respective methods to the Holocaust, both failing utterly to encompass its truth.

Alan Bennett admits to using the Irwin method to cheat (as he calls it) on his own exams. But it is clear he had a Hector behind him also: he turned out to have one of the most brilliant and widely cultured minds of his generation. And one of the funniest.

Summary of The History Boys: A Play

"A play of depth as well as dazzle, intensely moving as well as thought-provoking and funny." --The Daily Telegraph

An unruly bunch of bright, funny sixth-form (or senior) boys in a British boys' school are, as such boys will be, in pursuit of sex, sport, and a place at a good university, generally in that order. In all their efforts, they are helped and hindered, enlightened and bemused, by a maverick English teacher who seeks to broaden their horizons in sometimes undefined ways, and a young history teacher who questions the methods, as well as the aim, of their schooling. In The History Boys, Alan Bennett evokes the special period and place that the sixth form represents in an English boy's life. In doing so, he raises--with gentle wit and pitch-perfect command of character--not only universal questions about the nature of history and how it is taught but also questions about the purpose of education today.


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