The History Boys

1. The History Boys How does Alan Bennett present history in The History Boys?

2. Reviews • “Countless dramatists before Bennett have gone back to school for drama. But Bennett's play outshines its predecessors because it is about the tragic and fulfilling aspects of teaching, about the changing face of England and ultimately about the nature of history itself. At first it seems a bit wild and ramshackle: a collection of very funny and moving scenes without any visible grand design. (...) The History Boys defies categorisation -- and for this reason, it is the most experimental play in London. It owes little to past models. It subversively mixes up drama, comedy, poetry, popular song and ancient hymns, anecdote and aphorism, WH Auden and Gracie Fields in an eclectically English way." • - Michael Billington, The Guardian

3. The truth behind the History Boys Making history: Alan Bennett and Nicholas Hytner Comment Alan Bennett's new play The History Boys has received rave reviews – and caused a meltdown at the box office. 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 Nicholas Hytner 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?

4. Alan Bennett: 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.

5. Read Bennett’s comments on this link: • http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/drama/3619379/The-truth-behind-the-History-Boys.html

6. But Bennett's prime concern is with how history actually happens. In a brilliant earlier scene, a pupil makes a coded move on the closeted Irwin while illustrating the chanciness of events. Anxious to impress, the boy points out that when Chamberlain resigned as prime minister in 1940, Lord Halifax rather than Churchill was his preferred replacement. But on the key afternoon when the decision was taken, Halifax chose to go to the dentist. "If Halifax had had better teeth," the boy points out, "we might have lost the war." That's both an example of the jaunty journalistic cleverness that gets good exam results and a demonstration of Bennett's own belief in the accidental nature of history.

7. For some, like Macaulay and Trevelyan, history is a steadily unfolding narrative with a pleasing aesthetic shape. For others, such as Eric Hobsbawm or EH Carr, history exemplifies Marxist theory. But Bennett's view is closer to that outlined by Geoffrey Barraclough in An Introduction to Contemporary History . "Bertrand Russell," Barraclough writes, "once said that 'the universe is all spots and jumps' and the impression I have of history is much the same. At every great turning point of the past we are confronted by the fortuitous and the unforeseen, the new, the dynamic and the revolutionary; at such times, as Herbert Butterfield once pointed out, the ordinary arguments of causality are 'by no means sufficent in themselves to explain the next stage of the story, the next turn of events.'"

8. Alan Bennett interviewed: • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtVZuhlkl2I&feature=channel