The History Boys ... why has it remained popular for so long?
I’ve seen it twice, first at its premiere at the National in 2004, then in the West End. It’s been to Broadway, toured the planet and here it is back in the heart of our own theatreland. Why has Alan Bennett’s History Boys had an even longer and larger life than his The Madness of George III – or The Madness of King George as it was known in America, a country where numbers signify cinematic sequels, not sequential monarchs?
I’m not sure I’m right – shows can acquire an unstoppable momentum, accumulating success the way rocks accumulate snow – but I’d like to think that the play touches a contemporary nerve and confronts a contemporary anxiety. Isn’t the nation of Shakespeare and Auden, Hardy and the great Gracie Fields descending into a slick philistinism? Isn’t education becoming less a means of enriching minds than of greasing whatever mental wheels lead to success in the marketplace? Isn’t British culture itself moving from the dumps to the doldrums?
The play’s strength is, of course, that it raises these questions in a witty, funny way. There’s no more hilarious scene in London than the one in which Desmond Barrit’s Hector, the school’s large-minded, sexually flawed maverick, lets his class of Oxbridge hopefuls improvise an episode in a French brothel and then, when the headmaster appears to find a pupil without trousers, pretends that they’re performing a painful scene set in a First World War field hospital....
Read entire article at Times (UK)
I’m not sure I’m right – shows can acquire an unstoppable momentum, accumulating success the way rocks accumulate snow – but I’d like to think that the play touches a contemporary nerve and confronts a contemporary anxiety. Isn’t the nation of Shakespeare and Auden, Hardy and the great Gracie Fields descending into a slick philistinism? Isn’t education becoming less a means of enriching minds than of greasing whatever mental wheels lead to success in the marketplace? Isn’t British culture itself moving from the dumps to the doldrums?
The play’s strength is, of course, that it raises these questions in a witty, funny way. There’s no more hilarious scene in London than the one in which Desmond Barrit’s Hector, the school’s large-minded, sexually flawed maverick, lets his class of Oxbridge hopefuls improvise an episode in a French brothel and then, when the headmaster appears to find a pupil without trousers, pretends that they’re performing a painful scene set in a First World War field hospital....