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Passion and Pedagogy: The History Boys

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Trailer for "The History Boys"

I never saw Beyond the Fringe, the famous, early 1960s comedy review Alan Bennett appeared in and helped write, but I have a vague recollection of one sketch involving a prison warden from a recording of the show, and a firm recollection of one line. The perturbed official, told of homosexual activity among the prisoners, responds testily, “Just let them have their fun; they’ll find out just how unappealing men can be!” (Or words to that effect.)

This snippet doesn’t have much of anything to do with the movie version of Bennett’s acclaimed play, The History Boys, winner of six Tonys earlier this year during its New York run. (The movie was shot in the brief period between the play’s closing in London and its opening in New York.) I don’t have any idea if the youthful Bennett wrote that line, but there is, I think, a kind of spiritual lineage between it and the play and movie. It’s hard to imagine an American writing the sketch or Bennett’s play. Americans have rarely been puckish about either homosexually or education, and The History Boys is concerned, in its way, with both.

The boys of the title are eight youngsters in a middling, northern England prep school who have been put in a senior-year honors program designed by the school’s ambitious, small-minded headmaster to get them into either Oxford or Cambridge University.

The eccentric doyen of the faculty is Hector (Richard Griffiths), a fey, rotund 60ish poetry instructor who finds himself leading a class in what the head calls General Studies, a category Hector sniffs at. It’s not immediately obvious what he is trying to teach his pawky young charges. It looks to be a motley syllabus. The kids memorize poems ranging from Auden to Houseman. They perform improvised playlets in French (in one of which a boy acts sans “pantaloons” just as the head unexpectedly enters the room). They sing solos of ancient pop standards to piano accompaniment and try to stump Hector by doing a scene from the old Bette Davis weepie, Now Voyager. (They don’t know it’s a trash classic. He responds by reciting the lines from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass that contain the movie’s title.)

It soon transpires that the flamboyantly perverse teacher is trying to incite “a reverence for words,” to get them to believe in their use as a means to express and comprehend human connections and individuals’ isolation. Or, as one affectionately mocking boy says, “breaking bread with the dead.”

Bennett’s conflict comes in the person of Mr. Irwin (Steven Campbell Moore) a newly minted Oxford history graduate whom the head has hired to groom the lads for the “Oxbridge” entrance competition. Irwin takes a practical approach; he prompts the students to adopt a tactical deployment of learning. It’s not for the development of selfhood and wisdom. He tells them to take unconventional tacks in their exams and interviews in order to provoke and stand out. (Hector isn’t even convinced they should go to a place like Oxford.) And this places the boys in the middle.

Or would if Bennett and director Nicholas Hytner consistently dramatized these divergences in practice and philosophy. They seem as interest in other aspects of the students’ and teachers’ lives.

Posner (Samuel Barnett), a slight, gifted Jewish boy (he sings a Rodgers and Hart song so ethereally it sounds a little like Purcell) has a pash for Dakin (Dominic Cooper), clever, confident and cynical, who’s much more interest in the head’s nubile young secretary.

And Irwin has his own secret doubts and conflicts beneath his take-charge classroom manner. Ironically, he seems to be teaching some solid revisionist history to the guys. And his relations with Hector aren’t unmarked by respect. Everyone’s status is a little fluid, including Hector, with his penchant for giving the boys rides on his motorcycle in order to take modest liberties. He is, of course, an idiosyncratically ideal teacher. Neither he nor the students could exist outside a West End play or a movie screen.

The History Boys is neither particularly subtle nor dramatically resounding, but it is both witty and appealing. The movie still resembles a well-made play despite Hytner’s room-circling shots and montages. The director’s chief accomplishment has been to frame and sustain the largely original cast’s skilled performances.

The History Boys isn’t as serious as it wants to be, although it probably is the closest to a play of ideas that Bennett is ever likely to write. Like Hector and young Dakin, it’s a bit of a tease, but it’s so ingratiating, and so adept at revealing its modest surprises, that you’re unlikely to mind.