davidclensy.com

Alan Bennett’s The History Boys is his best-received piece of work since the 60s. As tickets go on sale for its Hull dates later this year, David Clensy talks to the much-loved playwright

For me, the idea of being in a theatre with Alan Bennett was on a par with marlin fishing with Ernest Hemingway, or taking a day trip to Brighton with Graham Greene. Thrilling and disconcerting in equal measure. But when the moment came I was sitting with my head in the programme, surrounded by the multi-storey car parkstyle architecture of the National Theatre, and for a few minutes I didn’t even notice Alan Bennett had entered the room. For such a towering figure in the theatre world, he’s hardly an imposing presence in person, and had quietly made his way through the gaggle of hacks to take a seat next to the buffet.

Looking up from Alan’s monochrome image in the glossy pamphlet to be met by his thoughtful stare from beside the triangular sandwiches, produced a momentary disorientation.

To Alan, the National Theatre, on the south bank of the River Thames, is comfortable territory. And it’s no accident his latest box office hit The History Boys is still running at the venue almost two years after its premiere.

More arty than glitzy, the National is peopled by academic tweedy-looking theatre-goers who appear to be interested in the play, as opposed to the tourists who maintain a strong foothold the West End because it’s on the coach-trip itinerary.

However, the play, which Bennett says is the best-received piece he’s produced since his Beyond The Fringe days, is to tour the country this autumn. And in a coup for Hull New Theatre, it will spend a week at Kingston Square in October.

It will arrive in Hull just days after being released as a movie, so it’s little surprise The History Boys is expected to be the hot ticket of the season in the East Yorkshire city. For the 71-year-old playwright, the show’s success is testimony to his ability to strike a chord with theatre-goers.

“You don’t know how it will go at first,” he says. “Once you see how it affects the audience, you realise it’s going to be a success.”

The play tells the story of Hector, an inspirational teacher of the “Captain, my Captain” mould, who uses poetry to teach history. But his romantic methods of inspiring pupils fall foul of the headmaster who employs a more pragmatic master to guide the sixth-formers through the Oxbridge entrance exams.

“It is a comfortable play in the sense that an audience would like, rather romantically, to have been taught by a teacher like Hector, who teaches poetry when he should be teaching history. People have a romantic ideal of what education should be like, but there are very few teachers like that now,” he says with a gentle shrug of the shoulders. Teachers are more interested in things that will get pupils through exams.”

The erosion of a well-rounded education in favour of exam-passing tactics is something that clearly concerns Alan, though he admits he too was prone to such strategies as a young man.

“I don’t remember the sixth-form in my year being outstandingly clever, but in 1951, for the first time, the headmaster made an effort to push some university entrants towards older universities. Snobbery was part of it, I imagine. By the same token he switched the school from playing soccer to rugby, though since I avoided both, this had little impact on me.”

“In the play, the teacher Irwin coaches the boys in the techniques of catching the examiner’s eye, and that’s largely based on my own experience of getting through exams. I soon discovered an examination is two-thirds journalism – providing the right references at the right moments.”

Alan learnt 40 or 50 quotations he knew would be eye-catching to examiners, and shaped his arguments to fit.

“I was not dishonest; I kept to the rules and didn’t crib, but nevertheless I cheated,” he recalls, ruefully.

Working with actors in their late teens and early 20s gave Alan an eye-opening insight into the current education system.

“The boys knew some of their lines were funny, but they were surprised when they heard the audience’s response, to find there were jokes they didn’t know were jokes,” he says. “It was an educational experience for them in the sense that the play is full of literary references – and a lot of that went over their heads at first. But at the National you have plenty of time to take them through all their lines. It was like being at school. I had to explain who Philip Larkin was and who WH Auden was, and teach them all the history they needed to know for the play.

“That may sound shocking, but you have to remember that most of the actors left school at 16. So I wasn’t surprised they didn’t know who Auden was. What did surprise me was that one of the actors didn’t even know what plural meant. He’d simply never been taught it. It’s shocking, but not wholly unexpected with the way education is these days.”

However, he is surprised the play hasn’t caused more ripples in the education industry. “I’ve had less response from teachers than I expected,” he says. “One thing that’s a bit depressing is people think it’s a funny play, and it’s therefore not thought to be a serious play. That’s often a problem with what I write.

“A lot of the debates in the play are debates that are going on in the real world. But seldom is the play cited in any of the arguments that are made. If there was more gloom in the play it would be seen as more significant I suppose.”

It has been a surprise hit with school boys and girls.

“It was unexpected that young people should like it, but it is set in a school, and there’s quite a lot of swearing in it, so maybe that’s what they like.”

But Alan says the play is far from a single issue piece – issues are complicated by the indiscretions of the main character.

“The big problem is, Hector is a wonderful teacher, but he also touches the boys up on the back of his motorbike,” Alan says. “And that’s either taken by some critics to be an endorsement of that sort of behaviour, or at least that I’m not bothered about it. Though I do think there’s a lot of hysteria about the subject.

“All the boys are 17 or 18 in the play, and in fact he, Hector, is the innocent. They’re much more sophisticated and tolerant than, say the Daily Mail, might be about the subject.”

The importance of education seems to be an issue Alan feels passionately about.

“It really isn’t a play with one central message,” he says. “But if you had to sum it up, you’d look at the end when Hector says he just wants to ‘pass it on – pass the parcel’ from generation to generation.”