Alan Bennett: The Dramatist Who Started Out as a Historian

Paul Taylor in the London Independent (May 7, 2004):

Alan Bennett's illustrious career as a stage dramatist began in 1968 with Forty Years On, a comedy set in a minor public school symbolically named Albion House. Now, close to 40 years on, his new play The History Boys returns to a school location - this time a top grammar school in Yorkshire at the start of the 1980s....

Alan Bennett was trained as a historian (his specialist subject was Richard II's knights) and he taught as a junior lecturer at Magdalen College, Oxford until Beyond the Fringe made history history for him - a joke he cracks in a slighter form in the introduction to his history play, The Madness of George III. Accordingly, what we mean by "history" and what we hope to transmit when we teach it as an academic subject are questions bound to be thrown up, given the nature and context of the piece.

The Irish dramatist Brian Friel once wrote a play that contrasted the equivocal Elizabethan Ulster figure of Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone and the myth of him as the embodiment of nationhood created by later historiography. The pun in the play's title, Making History, encapsulated its theme: historians don't just make history in the sense of converting past events into books; their books can consciously aim to shape current events. Bennett's imagination is drawn to such dubieties of phrase and deed, and I shall be very surprised if his new play does no more than touch on these issues.

The great English historian FW Maitland urged us always to remember that events now far in the past were once in the future, and that there is no such thing as historical predestination. This principle applies to the careers of dramatists. The Alan Bennett who wrote Forty Years On in 1968 was not always going to evolve into the Alan Bennett whose next school play, The History Boys, is premiered in 2004. For a start, back then, it looked as though Bennett might have the least rewarding career of the quartet from the ground-breaking 1961 revue, Beyond the Fringe. It is said, not least by himself, that he went through a period of disabling jealousy at the apparently more successful careers of his Fringe colleagues (a condition he had not entirely grown out of in 1980 when the poor critical reception of Enjoy, in my view his best stage play, somehow managed to cause a rift between him and his friend and neighbour, Jonathan Miller).

How ironic all this now seems, given the immense popularity he went on to secure in the late 1980s with the Talking Heads series on television, and in the 1990s with the Wind in the Willows adaptation and The Madness of George III (both directed, like the new work, by Nick Hytner) and the publication of his best-selling diaries, Writing Home.