The History Boys
Nicholas Hytner (2006)
A filmed performance of Alan Bennett’s lauded play would have had a valid purpose, as an opportunity for a larger audience to see a famously successful stage production. In the event, the lack of cinematic life in the movie of The History Boys has a more negative explanation: Nicholas Hytner, for all his huge reputation in theatre, seems to be a primitive film-maker. At the start of the picture, as the eight title characters crowd round the school notice board to find out their A-level results, there’s a uniform chatter of excited anticipation and nearly uniform boisterous celebration when they see their grades. Wouldn’t a couple of these academically ambitious – in some cases anxious – boys be quiet with apprehension or relief? Hytner directs as if noise and activity, however unconvincing, are all that’s needed to turn a stage play into a motion picture.
Perhaps for a similar reason, he seems wary of retaining extended dialogue between characters in the same place – yet the film’s best scene by far comes when one of the boys, Posner, recites Thomas Hardy’s ‘Drummer Hodge’ and discusses it with the school’s star teacher Hector (a nickname?). The sequence may be physically static but it has emotional movement: you realise that, by the end of this exchange, both teacher and pupil have learned from – been changed by – their conversation. Some of the performances in this adaptation look to be utterly ‘unadapted’ from a different medium. In the classroom, the boys often look to be reprising physical routines that might have had some snap or rhythm on stage but look artificial on screen. It’s hard to believe from what they do in this film that one or two of the adults in the cast weren’t overacting in the theatre, even if you were watching from the upper circle. Clive Merrison’s headmaster is the worst offender.
The History Boys is about the autumn term following the summer holidays during which the boys get their A-level results – the term in which they are prepared for and take Oxbridge entrance. It’s supposedly set in a Sheffield grammar school in 1983. Sheffield seemed to me a surprising choice of location for a Yorkshire grammar school in the eighties: I’d have expected the city, with its enduringly strong tradition of Labour local government, to have been in the vanguard of the switch to comprehensive education in the second half of the 1960s[1]. The History Boys is really all about Alan Bennett and is based on his own late schoolboyhood, preparing for Oxbridge exams at a Leeds grammar school (Leeds Modern) in the early 1950s. (It may also be about, to a lesser extent, Nicholas Hytner at Manchester Grammar School in the first half of the 1970s.) It’s a change to see a film set in Yorkshire in the 1980s in which Mrs Thatcher plays such a small part (although she gets a mention) but that’s only because The History Boys isn’t, in any meaningful way, set in the 1980s. In his diaries, Bennett is disarmingly honest about the play’s historical context being a sham.
When you read a play or watch it in the theatre, it’s usual to feel that what you’re experiencing primarily is the imaginative world of the playwright. This can help you suspend various kinds of disbelief about the piece. It’s obviously possible to experience something analogous in a screen piece. But in the cinema you’re liable to be more conscious of the techniques and preoccupations of the film’s director rather than its writer, where these are different people. I suspect the historical unreality of The History Boys would have got in the way of my admiring it even in the theatre but I imagine that Nicholas Hytner, in the stage version, was expressing Alan Bennett in ways that are not true of the screen version. Bennett may have written the screenplay but the very first sequence, in which we see a couple of the boys making their way to the school on A-level results days, is ‘opening out’ of stage material of the most perfunctory kind – and Hytner isn’t equipped to conceal the perfunctoriness. The lack of eighties texture is a fundamental problem. In that prologue, the two boys are wearing Walkmans – for purely time-setting purposes. There are virtually no subsequent references to contemporary culture; the boys have no life, or shared experience, outside school.
Perhaps Bennett is making the point (though I doubt it) that being prepared for Oxbridge is all-consuming but, in that case, why don’t he and Hytner make a virtue of the boys’ blinkered world view and restrict the action to the classroom? We can accept that, as the school’s crème de la crème, the group is isolated from others of their age (who will already have left school). We can’t accept the history boys don’t talk to each other about books or films or music or sport or politics of the 1980s. They’re believable as embryo Oxbridge undergraduates only through their shared propensity for sarcastic aphorism, the kind of stuff which has issued from the mouths of young men – never, it seems, young women – in dramatisations of student life at Oxford and Cambridge from generation unto generation. Is it an intended irony that the boys are at their funniest when at their least literate? Or that, as conveyed in an epilogue summarising what they went on to do as adults, none of their destinations is surprising or illuminating?
Each of the three members of staff involved in preparing the boys for Oxbridge entrance is the schematic representative of a particular educational approach. (As a group, though, they seem to be variations on a those-who-can-do-those-who-can’t-teach theme.) The boys’ regular history teacher Mrs Lintott (Frances de la Tour) majors on the learning of facts. A young man called Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore) encourages the boys to think for themselves; he values original analysis above ‘objective’ truth. The boys’ favourite is the charismatic Hector (Richard Griffiths). I didn’t understand what element of Oxbridge entrance Hector was responsible for: the Wikipedia article on the film says he teaches ‘General Studies’ but that is (or was) an A-level subject. He’s evidently coaching Posner in English – but he seems chiefly concerned with giving the boys a broader ‘cultural’ education.
Hector’s frame of reference has strong, often venerable, gay inflections – Noel Coward, Bette Davis films, references to writers known to have been homosexual (A E Housman, for example). Hard as it is to believe, Hytner and Bennett seem not to realise how the time-warped quality of the piece shifts the emphasis of Hector’s tutelage: he’s inculcating the boys with a set of gay cultural reference points that’s largely anachronistic and seems likely to turn them into misfits in the world they’re about to enter. We also learn that Hector, when he gives the boys lifts home on his motorcycle, surreptitiously fondles them: here too, Bennett and Hytner ignore the implications of a teacher doing this in the 1980s compared with the 1950s.
One of the supposed high points of the story occurs when, in one of Hector’s classes, Posner sings Rodgers and Hart’s ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered’ in the pointed direction of one of the other boys, Dakin. This is perhaps the moment when the confusion at the heart of the material comes to full bloom. As Posner, Samuel Barnett is good at suggesting an inchoate, developing intelligence but his overt crush on Dakin isn’t convincing. (It’s all the more unconvincing because Dominic Cooper, who plays the supposedly irresistible Daklin – in their different ways, Posner, Hector and Irwin all fancy him – is remarkably unappealing.) Alan Bennett famously came out as gay late in life. There’s more of him in the light-haired, humorously self-deprecating Posner than in any of the other boys (although teenage religiosity and an interest in the ruins of ancient cathedrals are Bennett traits assigned to other characters). It’s as if Bennett wishes that, as a teenager in Leeds, he’d been able to express openly his sexual feelings for more glamorous contemporaries – Posner singing a Rodgers and Hart love song is, in other words, a what-might-have-been fantasy on the part of the writer.
Bennett may think the moment gains credibility from the story being set thirty years on from his own experience – in a decade when he might have been less shy about being gay. But he hasn’t updated Posner to the extent that the boy is thoroughly comfortable with his sexuality; and the anachronism of the song is excruciating. The type of gay sensibility that Alan Bennett can represent with empathy is so essentially a love that dare not speak its name that if it’s made overt (and, as it seems here, is accepted by the peer group), the character doesn’t fully make sense. (Bennett is quite limited in dramatising more extrovert homosexuality: his screenplay for Prick Up Your Ears, for example, didn’t really bring Joe Orton or Kenneth Halliwell to life.)
Some of the boys’ parts are much more thinly written than the fluent, witty dialogue would suggest. A boy called Scripps, for example, is largely featureless apart from his churchgoing: fortunately, Jamie Parker, who plays him, has a warm, easy presence that draws the camera and you sense a good young screen actor in the making. Some of the others in the class – especially James Corden and Russell Tovey – have already gone on to better things. Richard Griffiths and Frances de la Tour, who also played their respective roles on stage, are expert, and Penelope Wilton is funny in a cameo as an art history teacher. Yet there’s something phony and self-pleasuring about the whole enterprise. At one point, someone – probably Hector, possibly in French – comes out with, ‘To understand all is to forgive all’. I’ve admired a lot of what Alan Bennett has written for television and as a prose memoirist. My problem with The History Boys was that I felt I understood him too well and found his self-indulgence unforgivable.
19 October 2006
[1] Afternote: Some years after seeing the film, I did a quick Google search, which brought up the following piece from the Sheffield Star, dated October 2009 and entitled ‘Do you remember when Sheffield went fully comprehensive?’: ‘Forty years ago this term, Sheffield schools underwent the greatest upheaval seen in modern times with the introduction of the comprehensive system. … In June 1968 Sheffield pupils sat their 11 plus exams for the very last time. …’ Of course, some of Sheffield’s grammar schools (according to the Star article, there were ten in the late 1960s) may have retained the ‘grammar’ in their names but it’s misleading to suggest that the group of eight in The History Boys are ‘grammar school boys’, according to the cultural-historical meaning of the term.