STAGE
The History Boys
Greenwich Theatre
★★★✩✩
IN A NUTSHELL
Alan Bennett's gloriously robust examination of the purposes of education gets a welcome revival.
REVIEW
I had a thought on leaving this buzzy production of Alan Bennett's classroom classic. I overheard the same thought from a genteel and mature lady who was airing her views forcefully to her son who seemed embarrassed by his generation and its crass liberties.
The History Boys is about education - education for life versus education for exams - but it is most particularly, pointedly and repeatedly about sexual predation by older men of younger boys.
Alan Bennett rather likes, one suspects, scattering the tea cups and overturning plates of battenberg that are the motifs and shackles of his status as a national treasure.
Fun stuff, but, ultimately, it all becomes overbearing and weary.
Especially when overtly heterosexual Dakin is prepared to venture over the border just to say thanks to a closet teacher where an apple or a nice card would seem commensurate with the scale of the exchange.
The film of The History Boys sidesteps quantities of this obtrusive lust (save the grope that is instrumental to the plot) and does a better job of creating convincing character and argument.
The other thing - and I fear that I may irretrievably cast myself as the soul mate of the outraged blue rinse - is that Bennett rather too often uses swear words as punchlines.
Now I have no problem with swear words as punchlines but here it is as if Bennett looks in his box of tricks and spots a nice, plump four-letter doozy and thinks "that'll please the stalls".
He is such a mellifluous and compelling writer and his arguments prowl the stage with such an air of delicious danger that it seems a shame he doesn't believe we demand more.
Why win a grin with a witty riposte when a C-bomb does the damage.
This is no way to disparage this serviceable revival of the play which sees a bunch of northern prospects put through their paces to land a place at Oxbridge.
They become caught in a tug-of-war between cynic Irwin and romantic Hector and that, and the precocity of the lads, is where the fun is to be had.
Marcus Taylor as the head steals most of the laughs but there are commendable displays all round from the talented and committed ensemble.
Until June 24. Go to greenwichtheatre.co.uk.
