In May, 2004, Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys premiered in London.  Since then it has enjoyed a world tour of the original cast, an adaptation for BBC Radio, and a film version.  Available on CD and DVD, The History Boys has also been revived twice in London and been performed by local theatres elsewhere.

On one level it is a fun show, full of witty turns of phrase and toe-tapping tunes from the Big Band era.  In a Berlitz sort of surprise, one scene is almost entirely in French.  On another level, the play is deeply disturbing.

Although he made his name as a satirist, the playwright is a serious student of history.  In the late 1950s Alan Bennett (b. 1934) taught history at Oxford, where he was a Fellow of Magdalen College.  His love of history has manifested itself in such works as Forty Years On (1968) and The Madness of George III, also called The Madness of King George (1991).  The History Boys offers reflections on the nature of history, whether it is a random roll of the dice or, to paraphrase one of the boys, just one bloody thing after another.

The boys of the title are eight blue-collar high school students in northern England in the 1980s, and they are scrambling to get into Oxford and Cambridge.  The boys are eager and energetic, like puppies in a box.  Bright and sometimes mischievous, theirs is the salty language affected by high school boys and military men, and early on in the play some repartee about foreskin sets the tone for their lack of inhibitions.

On the whole, the boys are thoroughly secular, worshipping the god of Success.  However, one of the boys, Scripps, is a devout Anglican, to the extent that he tells the audience, “I suspect even the vicar thinks I am a freak.”  He is also an aspiring writer, and while he shares his classmates’ ambition to get into Oxbridge, he has moments of introspection and self-doubt.  One of his classmates, a narcissist named Dakin, expresses amazement not only at Scripps having that incomprehensible quirk about praying, but also at Scripps letting his spiritual life restrain his sexual life.

More so than musings on history and education, though, this play is about sex.  Apparently all but two of the characters experience to some degree same-sex attraction, and the main adult character, an English teacher called Hector, encourages not only the boys’ open minds about books and about the past, but also about their libidos.

Moreover, we learn that Hector and the boys play a daily game with his own bisexual frustrations.  A married man, Hector nevertheless is physically attracted to the boys and takes turns groping them.  In classical fashion, such actions occur off-stage.

Hector is meant to be a sympathetic character, and it is clear that the boys love him and are willing to put up with his misbehavior.  As one of the boys, Crowther, observes in a retrospective moment, “He was stained and shabby and did unforgivable things, but he led you to expect the best.”

Other boys also find ways to excuse Hector violating them.  Regarding the fondling, Dakin asks Scripps, “Are we scarred for life, do you think?”  To which Scripps responds, “We must hope so.  Perhaps it will turn me into Proust.”

Lines like that are meant to be funny, but one must consider that if Hector were a Catholic priest, the show would quite rightly get no laughs at all.  For in the end, Hector is a child molester.  Whether the boys are open to or merely tolerate his advances is irrelevant.  Hector has made a career of abusing his students, and so despite the distraction provided by old popular songs and literary quotations and allusions, this play has an unpleasant undercurrent.

From Bennett’s essays collected in the volumes Writing Home (1994) and Untold Stories (2005), one gets a fuller view of how far he prides himself on his broad mind and sense of irony.  A clever and gifted writer, he can turn any situation, such as his struggle with colon cancer, into wry and perceptive prose.  A bizarre event, an old Catholic woman parking her van outside his house and staying there for fifteen years, became one of his plays, The Lady in the Van (1999).  Bennett portrays her as a quaint eccentric good for a laugh, one of the cues for our laughter being her admiration for Enoch Powell.

In Bennett’s world, the worst charge to bring against someone is being a conservative.  The pious, unhygienic old lady who liked the cranky Tory Enoch Powell is held up for our amusement, but Bennett reserves some of his harshest words for Philip Larkin and P. G. Wodehouse.  To Bennett’s way of thinking, they lurk as crypto-Nazis.

In The History Boys a young history teacher, Irwin, comes across as a fundamentally dishonest creep.  Bennett based Irwin on his interpretation of two prominent young British historians, Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts.  Both have made names for themselves in books and television, and both are men of the political right.

While Bennett deems the likes of Larkin and Ferguson to be morally reprehensible, one wonders whether deep down Bennett is worried about his legacy.  Roberts, for example, has written histories and biographies of lasting value, joining the ranks of the masters of the narrative approach to history.  Even though Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster are now period pieces from the 1930s, they continue to make people laugh.

Yet, for Bennett’s works such longevity is still an open question.  Forty years after Forty Years On, the jokes had faded, and soon only specialists in Cold War history will read his plays about the Communist spies Guy Burgess and Sir Anthony Blunt.  Likewise, in another ten years, The History Boys could be recalled simply for what it really is, an old man’s often jolly effort to justify pedophilia.

 

    Daniel J. Heisey, O. S. B, is a Benedictine monk of Saint Vincent Archabbey, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where he is known as Brother Bruno.  He teaches Church History at Saint Vincent Seminary.