Theater

The History Boys

The Lovable Pedophile

Alan Bennett’s characters are full of contradictions.

THE HISTORY BOYS TimeLine Theatre Company
Through 6/21: Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 4 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM, plus Wed 6/3-6/21 7:30 PM, Wellington Avenue United Church of Christ, Baird Hall Theatre, 615 W. Wellington (courtyard entrance), 773-281-8463, timelinetheatre.com, $15-$35.

By Albert Williams

April 30, 2009

British writer Alan Bennett has a knack for creating characters who are flawed, even distasteful, yet also sympathetic. Hector, the protagonist of Bennett’s 2004 The History Boys—now receiving its Chicago premiere at TimeLine Theatre—is an eccentric, popular middle-aged teacher at a boys’ school in Thatcher-era England. He’s also a pedophile. Beloved for his unorthodox teaching methods and his belief in the inherent value of knowledge, he gets his jollies by taking the better-looking teenage students for motorcycle rides and furtively fondling them at 50 miles per hour.

Hector faces a crisis when his headmaster orders him to share his classes with Irwin, a much younger teacher. Irwin’s mandate is to groom Hector’s sixth-form students (the equivalent of high-school seniors) for the history exams that will determine whether they’ll win scholarships to Oxford or Cambridge or have to settle for less prestigious universities.

For Hector, the purpose of education is to acquire knowledge for its own sake. For Irwin, it’s to learn how to express knowledge in catchy, iconoclastic ways that will capture the attention of overworked exam readers. (In later years, we learn, Irwin will become a historian/celebrity in the Simon Schama mold, diverting TV audiences with his pungently revisionist views of British history.) The men’s philosophical conflict is exacerbated by Irwin’s attraction to one of Hector’s favorite students, the handsome Dakin, who’s well aware of the erotic allure he holds for classmates and teachers alike.

Dense and literate but loosely structured, The History Boys jumps back and forth over 20 years, shifting fluidly between dramatic scenes, monologues, and fanciful musical numbers. Bennett’s dialogue is crisp and witty; his cultural references range from Henry VIII to the Holocaust, Auden to Rodgers & Hart, and Shakespeare to the salacious Carry On movies.

Director Nick Bowling’s imaginative staging bursts with spontaneity—crucial to a text as elegantly phrased as this one—and the whole cast is excellent. Donald Brearley and Andrew Carter are at once droll and achingly sad as Hector and Irwin. Ann Wakefield is wonderfully ironic as their colleague Mrs. Lintott, for whom history is “a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men.” Terry Hamilton’s perplexed headmaster, Joel Gross’s slick Dakin, Behzad Dabu’s Akthar (a South Asian boy who bristles at the mention of Kipling), and Michael Peters’s Rudge, whose main qualification for college is his skill at rugby, are all exceptional. And Alex Weisman is wonderful as Posner, a pudgy, late-blooming, Jewish gay student who combines earnest innocence with an outsider’s precocious insight. But all the young men cast as the students fully inhabit their roles, conveying the boys’ rambunctious irreverence, eagerness to please, and hunger for knowledge and experience.

Brian Sidney Bembridge’s inventive environmental set re-creates not only a schoolroom but the boys’ bedrooms, each decorated according to its inhabitant’s jumbled tastes and evolving personality. (Rudge’s wall is plastered with sports photos, Dakin’s got an Elvis Presley poster, Posner prefers Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand, and so on.) Mike Tutaj’s multimedia design juxtaposes footage of war documentaries—illustrating the boys’ curriculum—with clips from a home movie they’ve made.

The History Boys chronicles the interplay of intellectual, emotional, and sexual development in the school experience—a microcosm of society, Bennett suggests—even as it airs clashing views on the purpose of knowledge and the nature of history. It’s easy to side with Hector’s contention that academic competition and intellectual showing-off corrupts the educational process while missing the fact that his own free-form teaching style is a way of both showing off and disguising his moral hypocrisy. Hector is a complicated man in a complicated situation—indeed, a situation that he’s rendered more complicated. This is what makes him such a wonderful creation, and what makes The History Boys a rich, provocative play.   

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