Alan Bennett’s compelling and very funny play The History Boys is set in a grammar school in Sheffield in the 1980s and draws on Bennett’s own experience when as a northern grammar school boy himself he was set on the Oxbridge road by being taught how to pass exams, rather than taught knowledge of the subject itself. The school’s headmaster is obsessed with league tables (how little things have changed in twenty years!) and engages a former graduate to coach the boys in the art of passing the Oxbridge entrance exam, treading on the toes of the flamboyant and eccentric Mr Hector, whose passion for history, poetry and education for its own sake is a mismatch for the ideals of the school.
Gerard Murphy is a magnificent Mr Hector, portly and given to grand theatricals and swings between being overfriendly with the boys and cuffing them about the head when they don’t measure up to his vision. He is forceful and dominant but with such charm that even when later his somewhat distasteful behaviour is revealed everybody feels sorry for him. The diffident Headmaster is played by Thomas Wheatley and he is a fine piece of casting, tall and pale with a permanently worried expression.
As the play draws on the boys, at first viewed as a pack of unruly adolescents, separate and each is revealed with an identity of his own but fits like a jigsaw piece into the puzzle of the class. Dakin, the boy with everything, smart and good looking, Posner, small and downtrodden, confused about his sexuality, Scripps, his life shaped by his religious beliefs, Timms, the class clown and Rudge, clever but not academic. There are some old-fashioned songs woven into the plot and all the boys have fine voices, particularly James Byng as Posner.
There is a mightily funny scene in which Mr Hector is teaching French (which he is not supposed to do) and the boys enact a scene in a French brothel, with Christopher Keegan as Timms playing a very passable lady of the night seducing the hapless customer, Dakin played by Kyle Redmond-Jones. At the point at which Dakin has lost his trousers, the Headmaster comes in to introduce the new teacher, viewing the scene with palpable horror!
This is an excellent play with great performances throughout by all the boys and especially Gerard Murphy as Mr Hector, quite unforgettable.
Jacquie Vowles