Grab your motorcycle helmet. Sharpen up on the subjunctive. And cue the synthetic pulses of ‘Blue Monday’. The History Boys is back.
Alan Bennett’s 2004 play followed a cast of candidates vying for an Oxbridge place. Last month it was announced that the play is set to return to the London stage at the Theatre Royal Haymarket early next year. But we may ask: what’s the point of this revival?
I have to confess that I’m not quite a dispassionate observer of what a 2013 poll found to be Britain’s best-loved play. Bennett numbers among my favourite playwrights, and The History Boys among my favourite plays. When applying to Oxford, I didn’t consider Jesus or Corpus, as Irwin failed to get in there. I’m aware this is hugely embarrassing.
Despite my love for it, it’s hardly an uncontroversial work. AQA chose to remove the play from its GCSE syllabus in 2022. The frequent gripe for a contemporary audience is the play’s disturbingly frequent gropes. The idolised general studies teacher Mr Hector fondles his pupils on the back of a motorcycle. Whilst they’re all adults (just about), the pedophilic behaviour is deeply uncomfortable, especially so given Bennett’s initial wish for student Posner’s voice to be unbroken.
Though Bennett acknowledges this as a fault (“a grope is a grope. It is not the annunciation”, the terrific Mrs Lintott bites), he treats it as no more than a foible in an otherwise idealised picture. The final scene glorifies Hector with a funeral no less exalting than that of his mythic namesake. In another particularly delightful line, the “big man” can refer either to God or Hector. This issue aside, the play also undoubtedly has an air of entitled schoolboy arrogance, though I think Bennett is partly aware of it. Think Dakin’s cocky declaration: “We are so fucking clever.”
Perhaps more compelling than these reasons not to stage the play is the seeming absence of any reason to stage it. What’s it for? Just a cash grab? Would Forty Years On not be a better choice, his moving school-play-within-a-play that reappraises a postwar, post-Suez Britain? Why The History Boys? Why now?
A tenuous case could be made for its particular relevance today. In Burnham’s Britain, burdened by housing crises and championing vocational education, it’s apt that the most brilliant success of the play is Rudge’s business building homes for first-time buyers, whilst Posner (the only one who took all Hector’s teaching to heart) is unhappy at Cambridge, and persists in parasitic nostalgia for his schoolboy days. However, when speaking to The Times, even director Sir Nicholas Hytner couldn’t stomach a “specious” claim about its pertinence to today’s conversations about the education system.
The revival seems to be Hytner’s idea. Sir Nick is brilliant. Balancing Acts, his memoir on twelve years as artistic director of the National Theatre, is a tremendous read. His 2013 production of Othello is electric, and One Man, Two Guvnors is deftly delightful. His film direction of The Madness of King George (1994) is excellent if only for the climax: “I am the King!”, George declares, strapped into a chair. “No, sir, you are the patient!” returns the doctor as Zadok the Priest swells in this perverse anti-coronation. But can’t he do better? Following The Standard of Living earlier this year, is rehashing this old work the best Hytner can bring to the West End?
Perhaps Bennett suffers from a similar condition. His last effort was the film The Choral (2025), which, whilst moving, was a touch derivative. It became a tick-box list of Bennettisms: passions unfulfilled, power of art, Yorkshire. A scene towards the end echoes Bennett’s admittedly devastating Talking Heads episode, ‘Waiting for the Telegram’. There’s a whiff of Posner to this revival: a reliance on younger, more successful days. We have a 2020s remake of a 2000s play set in the 1980s based on Bennett’s 1950s schoolboy years.
But try as I might to scoff at it, I can’t help but be excited by the return. Crowther’s elegy for Hector may work well as a verdict on the play itself: “He was stained and shabby and did unforgivable things.” But “even his death was a lesson that added to the store”.
In all its blemished brilliance, The History Boys has lessons to add to the store. It speaks to us about the value of education, the struggles of growing up, and – perhaps most fascinatingly – the “sheer randomness of history”. Dakin’s discussions of how history happens, the unpredictability of Halifax’s teeth winning Britain the war, Rudge’s declaration that it’s just “one f***ing thing after another”, even the boys’ playing around “in the subjunctive mood”; these are all questions that play out in the narrative itself, with Hector’s potential expulsion, and the plot (and motorbike’s) lurch.
Whilst it’s easy to mock the play’s soppy view of literature, it’s both intensely moving and true. A poem can be that hand across history, reaching out and holding yours. The cast of characters is vividly sketched, from the plight of love-sick Posner serenading his unrequited sweetheart with Ella Fitzgerald, to the swaggering arrogance of Dakin, the razor-sharp satire of revisionist Irwin, and the no-nonsense and brilliantly perceptive Rudge.
It’s also great fun. Bennett captures the playful musicality of schoolboys teasing teachers: “Are jokes gonna be a feature, sir?” The film adaptation (a guilty pleasure) is similarly charming. It adds Penelope Wilton as an Art History teacher brushing the boys up in culture, and Adrian Scarborough as a devoutly religious press-up-demanding PE teacher (“give me 20!”, “what? Hail Mary’s?”).
These lessons might not be much, but, to butcher AE Housman’s words: all plays are worthwhile whether or not they serve the slightest human use. The History Boys numbers among them.
“Why now?”, we may ask. “Why not?”, we may answer. I’ll see you at the Royal Haymarket.
