Am I the only person to find Alan Bennett's new play - The History Boys at the National - a damp squib? It may have been a world premiere, but I sat through it with the creeping suspicion that I'd seen it many times before. I wonder if the director, Nicholas Hytner, chose to blast the auditorium with funky video clips and 1980s hits just in case we all thought we were watching a piece written before the war, or at least in the 1950s.
There's nothing wrong with intense classroom dramas, but this is a play whose sole purpose seems to be to restate fondly held notions - such as that Oxbridge, though daft, is still the best, particularly if you don't take it seriously.
Bennett's play, about a class of bright would-be Oxbridge students in a northern grammar school chasing the entrance exam to the dreaming spires, has a form line-up as neatly ordered as a box of Milk Tray. The actors playing the boys did their best, but there was no escaping the archetypes. There was the religious one, the gay/Jewish one, the common one, the popular one, the clever Asian and the African Caribbean (who had no real character, possibly because dreads and spliffs were considered a cliche too far). Judging by the programme notes, the only education Alan Bennett seems really interested in is his own.
The play turns on the question of what is best in education. Is it old-style, idiosyncratic teaching by characters in bow ties, or smart new thinking encouraged by youngish fogeys who'd rather have careers in the media? Bennett gives us a representative of both opinions, each with a fatal flaw. Old-school Hector, played by Richard Griffiths, is large and jovial and has an unfortunate predilection for fondling young boys while giving them a lift home on his motorbike. New bug Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore) is slim and corduroy-jacketed and thinks history essays should be full of outrageous but witty suggestions. He ends up in a wheelchair, which only helps his eventual career as a historian on television.
Apart from its offensive suggestion that teachers landing on boys' genitalia is actually quite jolly, everything about this play is predictable. Old-fashioned ideas such as teaching off the curriculum are "good"; everything "modern" - for example, history on TV - is lampooned. And why is having a wheelchair-bound TV history presenter such an obviously cynical ploy? People end up in wheelchairs. Sometimes they also end up on TV. The wheelchair prop was interesting, though, because it gave Bennett a tricky plot hurdle to overcome in order for Irwin to be semi-paralysed by the end of the show.
There are no such fun and games with the women. When Frances de la Tour turns to the audience and says, "Hithertofore, I have not been granted an inner voice", it is hilarious, because it is true. The women in the play are drily cynical dullards or sexually starved spouses - apart from the headmaster's secretary, who is so raring to go that she has it off on the carpet with both her boss and the class clown.
What made it all so disappointing is that both Bennett (Habeas Corpus, The Madness of King George) and Hytner (Jerry Springer: the Opera, Mother Clap's Molly House) are capable of theatre that makes you gasp. There is a play currently at the Arts Theatre in London which does this. It's called Fuddy Meers. Go and see it.
