The History Boys

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The History Boys

• How does Alan Bennett present history in The
  History Boys?

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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

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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?
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• 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.

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• Read Bennetts comments on this link
• http//www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/drama/3
  619379/The-truth-behind-the-History-Boys.html

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• 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.

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• 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.'"

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• Alan Bennett interviewed
• http//www.youtube.com/watch?vPtVZuhlkl2Ifeature
  channel