This 20th anniversary production of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys is sparklingly entertaining at Richmond Theatre as part of a UK tour
“One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human.
One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.”
What to do with a scene change? Many a production has been waylaid by dry and dull interludes as pieces of set are moved from one part of the stage to another but yet surprisingly few directors seize these opportunities to do something truly creative. Director Seán Linnen does just that though in this 20th Anniversary production of The History Boys as arranger Russell Ditchfield and musical director Eamonn O’Dwyer fill the transitions with acapella arrangements of 80s pop classics, both reaffirming this as a period piece but also revitalising it with a youthful energy.
That set, by Grace Smart who also designs the costumes, is cleverly conceived as its reversable block gives us the two worlds of Alan Bennett’s hugely popular 2004 play: the classroom in which this group of Sheffield sixth-form history students are being coached for the Oxbridge entrance exam; and the outside world where their teachers clash over the best way to teach them, where all sorts of repressed desires are expressed – in sometimes troubling ways, and where individual hopes and dreams play out in a multitude of ways across this eventful term.
Bennett’s dialogue remains an absolute gift for his cast, several here making strong professional debuts. From Yazdan Qafouri’s open-heartedness as Scripps to Archie Christoph-Allen’s rakish but still emotive Dakin to Lewis Cornay’s vulnerable Posner desperate just to be noticed, there is such joy in the raucous interplay between this group, however idealised it might be in its construction of wildly disparate personalities. Bill Milner’s tightly clenched Irwin and Gillian Bevan’s wise and wise-cracking Mrs Lintott also relish their characterful moments to influence the boys.
Alongside all of this though is the undoubted problematic nature of the their lead tutor Hector, played here by Simon Rouse. Bennett’s determination that Hector’s predilection for feeling up his students on his motorcycle is a forgivable quirk hangs a heavy shadow that this production does little to dispel. Rouse plays him as written, entirely affable and easily tolerated for his ‘peccadilloes’, this needs to be called out. At the same time, the French lesson is an utterly sublime moment of theatre. Both things can be true, it’s just “our perspective on the past alters“.
