The History Boys
Directed by Nicholas Hytner
Richard Burton once appeared on “The Tonight Show” and kidded Johnny Carson that “All British actors are gay.” This appears to be the thesis born out in the film version of The History Boys—in which playwright Alan Bennett adds, “All teachers and pupils, too.” As an all-male class at Cutler’s Grammar School in Yorkshire, England, prepare for their exams to enter Oxford and Cambridge, Bennett travesties the complex subject of sexual identity by turning the process of education into campy theatrics.
Despite the title, The History Boys isn’t really about a young generation’s response to history as a means of understanding one’s social role or connection to the past. Bennett peddles a none-too-subtle yet specious theory about sexual orientation: Every student is gay or else is a poofter-in-training. The boys’ affections are torn between a young new pedant (Stephen Campbell Moore) and their old favorite, the rotund culture vulture Mr. Hector (Richard Griffiths), who indulges their camp tendencies while sneaking in a grope or two. Hector’s classroom is decorated with vintage sheet music, movie posters and assorted pop paraphernalia. He should be teaching Drag Culture 101, but Bennett inserts numerous classical, literary quotations—as if penetrating the secret gay heart of English literary tradition.
Bennett’s schematic comedy-drama actually suggests Boys in the Band for Anglophiles, except it’s less insightful and far less forthcoming. His agenda confuses human rights with a persecution complex. The one student who declares his homosexuality adds, “I’m Jewish, small and from Sheffield. I’m fucked.” Well, not according to the West End/Broadway hegemony to which Bennett subscribes. When Hector is censured by Cutler’s cartoonishly narrow-minded headmaster, Bennett deviously piles on pathos—as if rewriting The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. The History Boys grows irksome because of Bennett pandering to members of the theater industry. On stage, this calculated hoax must have stank; on screen, it sucks.
Director Nicholas Hytner’s attempt at recreating 1983 England runs into culture shock. His soundtrack features The Smiths’ “This Charming Man” and New Order’s “Blue Monday”—songs redolent of the era when British pop had moved past androgyny into an extraordinary sexual openness. It makes Bennett’s coy special pleading seem especially out of date. Hytner doesn’t traduce those songs like Sofia Coppola, but he fails to transform Bennett’s thesis in their light. He allows Hector to defend his pederasty claiming, “The transfer of knowledge is itself an erotic art.” Never mind that he betrays his students’ trust. Yet the sensual-political knowledge of those songs doesn’t affect these boys’ lives, as they did the lives of pop listeners around the world. Hytner and Bennett don’t connect the songs to the historical process of sexual identification.
The school’s one female teacher, the dykey Mrs. Lintott (Frances de la Tour), denounces history as “a commentary on the incapabilities of men.” But it’s clear that Bennett is incapable of understanding what defines manhood or womanhood from the way Hector snobbishly conflates Brief Encounter and the Carry On movies as “sheer calculated silliness.” Though Bennett and Hytner flaunt English literary history, they have no appreciation for pop like Brief Encounter, The Smiths, New Order or of how sexually adventurous ’80s youth defined themselves. (There’s a better sense of what it means to be a male trapped by history in Irwin Winkler’s honorable new Iraq war drama Home of the Brave.) The History Boys purports to examine hegemony and class, but it collapses into pre-Stonewall self-pity.
Like last year’s disastrous film versions of Rent and The Producers, The History Boys perpetuates the myth of Broadway. It’s another unfathomably acclaimed production that, when seen without Broadway blinders, is exposed for lame ideas and superficial drama. Rent was cacophonous, The Producers had no real songs, and The History Boys merely glosses over the idea of political indoctrination. That the boys all have crushes on their teachers and each other reveals nothing new about adolescence or the English school system (see the 1984 film Another Country). This is not a bold premise, but a corruption of what Terence Rattigan explored in his 1950s play The Browning Version. Without the license of modern gay blatancy, Rattigan had to subtly convey the tensions of a “sensitive” schoolmaster’s sham marriage. Yet, Rattigan’s tact allowed for a more universal examination of masculine identity; his protagonist (delicately performed by Michael Redgrave in the 1951 film version) struggled with a design for living, a way to just be a man. In those days, theater mattered.
As if to prove the irrelevance of contemporary theater, director Hytner makes the mistake of “opening out” the play with exterior scenes and superficial, cinematic editing. (We actually see Hector cavorting with the boys on his motorcycle.) Passing off Bennett’s conceit as naturalistic ruins whatever impact it might have had as theater. When seen in a real-world context, class sessions where the boys act out scenes from Brief Encounter and Now Voyager seem daft. The History Boys is not serious drama; just an over-enunciating bunch of actors goofing off. Was Richard Burton not joking?
