Utterly useless play. The occasional "witty" line, but the whole thing felt very self-serving, self-congratulatory, and mechanical. And this pile of self-consciously Teddibly Intellectual Claptrap won the Tony for Best Play over Martin McDonagh's magnificent LIEUTENANT OF INISHMORE. The reviews I've read seem to think the play is a sort of battle of wills between Hector and another teacher for the souls of a group of boys doing an intensive cram session for their college boards. Hector supposedly represents the joy of learning for its own sake, while the other guy is all about passing the tests by any means necessary, history truth beauty be damned. The titular boys are a pretty mixed bag, but the play eventually sort of focuses on three of them: The Cute One, The Religious One, and The Gay One. The Gay One, of course, is hopelessly and predictably in love with The Cute One. There's even Fat One.The play's lone female role is shoehorned into the story, mainly so that the women in the audience can have someone to identify with. It gets rather cloying, though, and I was frankly annoyed by her little speech about history being all about men's failures: it felt entirely too much as if Bennett had suddenly decided to pander to the women in the audience to keep them from finding the play a bore. A more interesting female character might have been Hector's wife, but that would have gone into territory that Mr. Bennett isn't going to touch, as it might be something irresolvable with a witty one-liner, and would have shifted the focus away from the Boys.One of the major plot points is Hector's unfortunate habit of fondling his students. Mr. Bennett and his play bend over backward to present this as a harmless eccentricity, but it just doesn't wash. Sorry, I don't have a problem with someone losing their job for groping students. And I found myself wondering about the simple mechanics of it. We're supposed to believe that the morbidly obese Hector (at least as played by the brilliant but morbidly obese Richard Griffiths) plays with the genitals of students sitting behind him on a motorcycle. In broad daylight. At a public intersection. Every day. And only a woman behind the counter in a thrift shop notices.And I was not happy with the tragic fates of the gay characters. One dead, one in a wheelchair, one a housebound emotional cripple, while the straight folks all live (more or less, this is Alan Benett's universe after all) happily and wealthily ever after. And people bitched about BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN perpetuating the myth of gayness as misery?Down, blood pressure, down...
The award-winning play by Alan Bennett is a great read. More devoted to the influence of words (the "dictionary" boy role of Posner) and music than the later screenplay, the play emphasizes the differing perspectives on education of the two lead teachers (Hector and Irwin). Without the need to "open up" demanded by film Bennett focuses on the schoolroom and uses subtle effects to effect his dramatic purpose. One aspect of the play that stands out is the multiple narrators throughout the drama. He is at his epigrammatic best and the performances in New York showed this as noted by the Advocate review. Bennett is successful in creating a delightful dramatic and comedic portrayal of ideas, all while evoking the spirit of bright young scholars at a key turning point in their lives. With reference to and in the spirit of Shakespeare he is successful in creating a delightful dramatic and comedic portrayal of ideas, all while evoking the spirit of bright young scholars at a key turning point in their lives.The battle between educational styles, the approaches to teaching of each of the teachers, stood out for me. The foundation is Mrs. Lintott's straightforward approach to teaching history which has produced "well taught" boys, but that is not enough. The headmaster, in his "wisdom" adds into the mix a young teacher just up from Oxford to give the students an "edge". It is his, Mr. Irwin's, method that is the one of paradox and turning the historical facts upside-down, with little regard for the "truth" of the situation that will go to battle with the methods of Hector, the "general studies" teacher who is enlisting the boys into a conspiracy against the world and the "education" they are supposedly receiving.Mrs. Lintott: They're all clever. I saw to that.Hector: You give them an education. I give them the wherewithal to resist it.-Scripps: But it's all true.Irwin: What has that got to do with it? What has that got to do with anything?With all of this battle of educational styles there is the undercurrent of eroticism, both due to the nature of education itself, as Hector points out, and due to the psychological tensions among Dakin and his two admirers, Posner and Irwin. This combination, which explodes at times to produce riveting moments of theater, is what makes this play great. That and the magnificent literary style of Bennett.
What do You think about The History Boys (2006)?
IRWIN: So, what do we think of The History Boys then?RUDGE: It's a classroom drama, sir. Set in Yorkshire during the early 80s. Features a clash between two different styles of teaching, embodied by the two contrasting teachers, Mr. Hector and Mr. Irwin, who...IRWIN: Yes, yes, yes, everyone will write that. I am results-focussed, Mr. Hector teaches you the true value of culture. Perfect if you want to get into Bristol. Ideal for Sheffield. Someone else?SCRIPPS: It's got witty and inventive dialogue, sir. IRWIN: Such as? You need a striking example, you know.DAKIN: Mr. Hector calls me "sad" at one point, sir. Mrs. Lintott corrects him, and says she prefers the word "cuntstruck". She points out that it's a compound adjective. The rest of this review is available elsewhere (the location cannot be given for Goodreads policy reasons)
—Manny
Alan Bennett's fascinating play (which was made into a well-received motion picture starring the original cast from the West End and Tony Award-winning Broadway stage productions) about a group of English high school students studying for their Oxbridge entrance examinations, and how they are tutored by two different professors who possess contrasting teaching styles. Absolutely joyful, exuberant and bittersweet at the same time, the examination of their relationships with their tutors and each other clues us in to their seemingly disparate personalities that somehow blend them together.
—Skip
Winner of the Tony Award for Best Play in 2006, along with a host of other Tonys, this play focuses on eight students at a London school preparing for the British national entrance exams for Cambridge and Oxford (and other secondary schools), and two of their teachers: Hector is their English/General Studies teacher who inspires the boys to memorize and recite classic literature for the sake of pure knowledge rather than for the purpose of prepping for any one test; Irwin is their newly-hired History teacher who teaches a more structured and calculated style to help the boys pass the national exams. Beneath the tension between the two teachers and their instructional methods and aims lie some complicated relationships: Hector is a pedophile with interest in 7 of the 8 boys; one of the boys (Posner) has a crush on another boy (Dakin); Dakin is infatuated with the new History teacher, Irwin. Overall, I was disappointed. I had heard great things about the play from another reader, and with the host of received Tonys, I was expecting more. My first problem was that there are way too many boys; three of them have well-developed characters and personalities, but the other five seem like irrelevant background. The plethora of characters resulted in some limited development for half of them. My second problem was the length of the play – it feels short. While brevity is the soul of wit, I feel like too much is happening too quickly in too few scenes. For instance, there is one scene where the two teachers teach together, but it’s short; I felt like there should have been several more scenes of the two teachers interacting. The plot development felt rushed, especially with a critical moment late in the play that leads to the play’s conclusion; it felt forced. There’s a number of clever scenes and wordplay (especially one scene that compares World War I to attempted sex), but overall, a bit of a disappointment for me.
—Tung
