The History Boys (3 page)

Some of these views can be put down to the circumstances of my own education but also to a book which made a great impression on me as a young man. This was Richard Hoggart's
The Uses of Literacy
(1955), and in particular his account of growing up in the slums of Leeds, going to Cockburn High School, and eventually to Leeds University, where be was taught by Bonamy Dobree. It was a harder childhood than mine (and an earlier one) but it was reading Hoggart forty years ago that made me feel that my life, dull though it was, might be made the stuff of literature.
The Uses of Literacy
spawned a series of books, one of which,
Education and the Working Class
by Jackson and Marsden, included a study of sixth form boys who had made it to university but not done well there, the conclusion being that the effort of getting to university often took so much out of working-class boys that once there they were exhausted. This is one of Posner's complaints in the play.

‘The scholarship boy,' writes Hoggart, ‘has been equipped for hurdle-jumping, so he merely thinks of getting on, but somehow not in the world's way … He has left his class, at least in spirit, by being in certain ways unusual, and he is still unusual in another class, too tense and overwound, I had forgotten this passage until I found it quoted in
Injury
Time
, one of the commonplace books of D. J. Enright, who must also have found it relevant to his own case.

Things have changed since Hoggart was writing, and the boys in the play are more privileged than Hoggart, Enright or me, but I suspect hurdle-jumping hasn't much changed, or the strain it engenders, though maybe it shows itself less in terms of class.

At Oxford in the late fifties some of the teaching I did was for Magdalen (which explains why it is occasionally mentioned in the text). One year I was also drafted in to help mark and interview candidates for the history scholarships. It didn't seem all that long since I had been interviewed myself, and I was nervous lest my marks should differ from those of my more experienced colleagues by whom I was every bit as intimidated as the candidates were.

I needn't have worried, though, as apart from the papers of authentic Wykehamist brilliance, the other promising candidates were virtually self-selecting, one's attention always caught by oddity, extremity and flair just as Irwin foresees. Whether these candidates were genuine originals or (like the boys in the play) coached into seeming so, the interview was meant to show up, but I'm not sure it always did. It was the triumph of Irwin.

Candidates do well in examinations for various reasons, some from genuine ability, obviously, but others because doing well in examinations is what they do well; they can put on a show. Maybe it doesn't work like that now that course work is taken into consideration and more weight is given to solider virtues. But it has always struck me that some of the flashier historians, particularly on television, are just grown-up versions of the wised-up schoolboys who generally got the scholarships (myself included). Here is R. W. Johnson, himself an historian, reviewing Niall Ferguson's
The Pity of War
:

I had friends at Magdalen who went through this dialectical de-briefing in their first year and it used to worry me that nothing remotely similar happened at Exeter. Nothing much happened at all until my third year, when in the nick of time I began to get grips with it myself. Still, I never thought of this as a proper education, just a way of getting through the examinations.

These considerations have acquired a more general interest as history has become more popular both on the page and on the screen. The doyen of TV historians, Simon Schama, is in a league of his own, and his political viewpoint is not in the forefront, but the new breed of historians – Niall Ferguson, Andrew Roberts and Norman Stone – all came to prominence under Mrs Thatcher and share some of her characteristics. Having found that taking the contrary view pays dividends, they seem to make this the tone of their customary discourse. A sneer is never far away and there's a persistently jeering note, perhaps bred by the habit of contention. David Starkey sneers too, but I feel this is more cosmetic.

None of this posing, though, is altogether new. A. J. P. Taylor was its original exponent, certainly on television,
and was every bit as pleased with himself as the new breed of history boys. Still, with nothing else to put in the frame but his own personality and with no graphics and no film, he had perhaps more excuse for hamming it up a bit. His pleasure at his own technique, the flawless delivery (no autocue) and the winding-up of the lecture to the very second allotted were reasons enough for watching him, regardless of whatever history it was he was purveying. Even with him, though, the paradoxes and the contrari-ousness could get wearisome, certainly in the lecture hall, where I remember nodding off during one of his Ford Lectures.

Irwin's career path might seem odd. Schoolmaster to TV don is plausible enough, but from lecturing about the Dissolution of the Monasteries to Government spokesperson is a bit of a leap, though there are odder episodes in the early career of Alastair Campbell. No subject was further from my mind when I began to write the play, and it was only as I sat in on Irwin's classes, as it were, that I saw that teaching history or teaching the self-presentation involved with the examination of history was not unrelated to presentation in general.

The rehearsals for the plays were unusual in that the eight young actors playing the sixth-formers had to learn not only the parts they had to act but also what they meant. The play is stiff with literary and historical references, many of which, at first reading anyway, meant little to the actors. The early stages of rehearsal were therefore more like proper school than a stage version of it.

They read and talked about Auden, a favourite of Hector's in the play (though not of Mrs Lintott). Auden keeps being quoted, so we read and discussed some of his poems and the circumstances of his life. Hardy was another subject for tutorials, leading on to Larkin much as happens in the last scene of Act One. The First and Second Wars figure largely in the play, as they seemed to do on the
classroom walls of the schools we visited to get some local colour before rehearsals started, so the period 1914–45 was also much discussed. I normally get impatient when there's a lot of talking before rehearsals proper start, but with this play it was essential.

Maybe, too, it says something about the status of the actor. Half a lifetime ago my first play,
Forty Years On
, though about a very different sort of school, was as full of buried quotations and historical allusion as
The History
Boys
. Back in 1968, though, there was never any question of educating the score or so boys that made up Albion House School. We never, that I recall, filled them in on who Virginia Woolf was or put them in the picture about Lady Ottoline Morrell. Sapper, Buchan, Osbert Sitwell – to the boys these must have been names only, familiar to the principal players, John Gielgud and Paul Eddington, but as remote to the rest of the cast as historical figures in Shakespeare. This omission was partly because with only four weeks to rehearse there wasn't time to tell them more, but also because in those days actors were treated with less consideration than they are now, at any rate at the National Theatre.

But these early rehearsals with Nicholas Hytner taking the class were a reminder that good directors are often good teachers (Ronald Eyre is another example) and that theatre is often at its most absorbing when it's school.

Always beneath the play you write is the play you meant to write; changed but not abandoned and, with luck, not betrayed, but shadowing still the play that has come to be.

It is to Nicholas Hytner that I owe, among so much else, the idea for the original play, the one I didn't quite write, as it first came to me when I was listening to him being interviewed by Michael Berkeley on BBC Radio 3's
Private
Passions
. Nick had earlier told me of his schooldays at Manchester Grammar School and how, having a good singing voice, he had sung in a boys' choir with the Hallé
under Barbirolli. I was expecting him to talk about this on
Private Passions
, but rather to my disappointment he didn't. However, one of the records he chose was Ella Fitzgerald singing ‘Bewitched' with its original Moss Hart lyrics, and it occurred to me at the time how theatrical this would sound sung by a boy with an unbroken voice.

This in turn took me back to my own childhood when, though I was no singer, I had been very slow to grow up, my own voice still unbroken when I was well past sixteen. So one of the history boys as first written was a boy much as I had been, a child in a class of young men. Nick (whose own voice broke at twelve) thought that these days a sixteen-year-old boy with an unbroken voice was both unlikely and impossible to cast. This I could appreciate, though at the time I abandoned the notion with some regret.

The casting difficulty I can understand, but I don't entirely agree that such late development no longer occurs. It's true that today most children develop earlier, but the few who don't suffer more acutely in consequence, and it certainly still happens. I knew one boy, the son of a friend, who matured every bit as late as I did, though he coped with it much better than me. Looking back, I see those years from fourteen to sixteen as determining so much that I would later wish away, particularly a sense of being shut out that I have never entirely lost.

As it is, Posner is the heir to the character I never quite wrote, a boy who is young for his age and whose physical immaturity engenders a premature disillusion. Watching Sam Barnett playing the part, I wince to hear my own voice at sixteen.

Title Page
Introduction
A Note On The First Production
Act One
Act Two
Acknowledgements
About the Author
By the Same Author
Copyright

I have not included many stage directions or even noted changes of scene; the more fluid the action the better. The design of the National Theatre production, by Bob Crowley, was of a classroom in a school built in the 1960s, with the scenes in the staff room and Headmaster's study achieved by re-arranging the sliding walls. These scene changes were done largely by the boys themselves, under cover of film sequences of life in the school projected on a large video screen above the set proper. These, like the opening shots of Irwin's TV series,
Heroes or Villains?
, were filmed by Ben Taylor. Except for one moment towards the end of Act Two, I have not given details of these video inserts in the script, though they do often help to move the action along: we see Dakin making up to the Headmaster's secretary, for instance; Hector coming disconsolately down the corridor after his dismissal; and the start of his final trip on the motor bike.

There is a piano on stage throughout, and this, too, helps to mask the scene change, besides accompanying the film extracts which enliven Hector's eccentric teaching regime.

The History Boys
was first performed in the Lyttelton auditorium of the National Theatre, London, on 18 May 2002. The cast was as follows:

Akthar
Sacha Dhawan
Crowther
Samuel Anderson
Dakin
Dominic Cooper
Lockwood
Andrew Knott
Posner
Samuel Barnett
Rudge
Russell Tovey
Scripps
Jamie Parker
Timms
James Corden

Headmaster
Clive Merrison
Mrs Lintott
Frances de la Tour
Hector
Richard Griffiths
Irwin
Stephen Campbell Moore

Other parts played by
Tom Attwood, Rudi Dharmalingam,
Colin Haigh, Joseph Raishbrook and Joan Walker

Director
Nicholas Hytner
Designer
Bob Crowley
Lighting Designer
Mark Henderson
Music
Richard Sisson
Sound Designer
Colin Pink
Video Director
Ben Taylor

The cover photograph includes members of the cast of this production. From back row to front: Russell Tovey, Andrew Knott, Jamie Parker, Samuel Anderson, Dominic Cooper, James Corden, Sacha Dhawan, Samuel Barnett

THE BOYS

Posner

Dakin

Scripps

Rudge

Lockwood

Akthar

Timms

Crowther

THE TEACHERS

Irwin

Hector

Headmaster

Mrs Lintott (Dorothy)

Irwin is in a wheelchair, in his forties, addressing three or
four unidentified MPs
.

Irwin
This is the tricky one.

The effect of the bill will be to abolish trial by jury in at least half the cases that currently come before the courts and will to a significant extent abolish the presumption of innocence.

Our strategy should therefore be to insist that the bill does not diminish the liberty of the subject but amplifies it; that the true liberty of the subject consists in the freedom to walk the streets unmolested etc., etc., secure in the knowledge that if a crime is committed it will be promptly and sufficiently punished and that far from circumscribing the liberty of the subject this will enlarge it.

I would try not to be shrill or earnest. An amused tolerance always comes over best, particularly on television. Paradox works well and mists up the windows, which is handy. ‘The loss of liberty is the price we pay for freedom' type thing.

School. That's all it is. In my case anyway. Back to school.

Though the general setting is a sixth-form classroom in a
boys' school in the eighties in the north of England, when
Hector first comes in, a figure in motor-cycle leathers and
helmet, the stage is empty.

His sixth-formers, eight boys of seventeen or eighteen,
come briskly on and take Hector out of his motor-cycle
gear, each boy removing an item and as he does so
presenting it to the audience with a flourish
.

Lockwood
(
with gauntlets
) Les gants.

Akthar
(
with a scarf
) L'écharpe.

Rudge
Le blouson d'aviateur.

Finally the helmet is removed
.

Timms
Le casque.

The taking-off of the helmet reveals Hector (which is
both his surname and his nickname) as a schoolmaster
of fifty or so
.

   
Dakin, a handsome boy, holds out a jacket
.

Dakin
Permettez-moi, monsieur.

Hector puts on the jacket
.

Hector
Bien fait, mes enfants. Bien fait.

Hector is a man of studied eccentricity. He wears a
bow tie
.

Classroom
.

Now fades the thunder of the youth of England clearing summer's obligatory hurdles.

Felicitations to you all. Well done, Scripps! Bravo, Dakin! Crowther, congratulations. And Rudge, too. Remarkable. All, all deserve prizes. All, all have done that noble and necessary thing, you have satisfied the examiners of the Joint Matriculation Board, and now, proudly jingling your A Levels, those longed-for emblems of your conformity, you come before me once again to resume your education.

Rudge
What were A Levels, then?

Hector Boys
, boys, boys.

A Levels, Rudge are credentials, qualifications, the footings of your CV. Your Cheat's Visa. Time now for the bits in between. You will see from the timetable that our esteemed Headmaster has given these periods the euphemistic title –

Posner looks up the word in the dictionary
.

– of General Studies.

Posner
‘Euphemism … substitution of mild or vague or roundabout expression for a harsh or direct one.'

Hector
A verbal fig-leaf. The mild or vague expression being General Studies. The harsh or direct one, Useless Knowledge. The otiose – (
Points at Posner
.) – the trash, the department of why bother?

Posner
‘Otiose: serving no practical purpose, without function.'

Hector
If, heaven forfend, I was ever entrusted with the timetable, I would call these lessons A Waste of Time.

Nothing that happens here has anything to do with getting on, but remember, open quotation marks, ‘All knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest human use,' close quotation marks.

Who said? Lockwood? Crowther? Timms? Akthar?

Pause
.

‘
Loveliest of trees the cherry now.'

Akthar
A. E. Housman, sir.

Hector
‘A. E. Housman, sir.'

Timms
Wasn't he a nancy, sir?

Hector
Foul, festering grubby-minded little trollop. Do not use that word. (
He hits him on the head with an
exercise book
.)

Timms
You use it, sir.

Hector
I do, sir, I know, but I am far gone in age and decrepitude.

Crowther
You're not supposed to hit us, sir.

We could report you, sir.

Hector
(
despair
) I know, I know.
(an elaborate pantomime,
all this
)

Dakin
You should treat us with more respect. We're scholarship candidates now.

We're all going in for Oxford and Cambridge.

There is a silence and Hector sits down at his table,
seemingly stunned
.

Hector
‘Wash me in steep-down gulfs of liquid fire.'

I thought all that silliness was finished with.

I thought that after last year we were settling for the less lustrous institutions … Derby, Leicester, Nottingham. Even my own dear Sheffield. Scripps. You believe in God. Believe also in me: forget Oxford and Cambridge.

Why do you want to go there?

Lockwood
Old, sir. Tried and tested.

Hector
No, it's because other boys want to go there. It's the hot ticket, standing room only. So I'll thank you (
hitting him
) if nobody mentions Oxford (
hit
) or Cambridge (
hit
) in my lessons. There is a world elsewhere.

Dakin
You're hitting us again, sir.

Hector
Child, I am your teacher.

Whatever I do in this room is a token of my trust.

I am in your hands.

It is a pact. Bread eaten in secret.

‘I have put before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.' Oxford and Cambridge!

He sits with his head on the desk, a parody of despair
.

Posner
(
Edgar
) ‘Look up, My Lord.'

Timms
(
Kent
)

‘Vex not his ghost. O let him pass. He hates him That would upon the rack of this tough world Stretch him out longer.'

Posner
(
Edgar
)

‘O, he is gone indeed.'

Timms
(
Kent
)

‘The wonder is he hath endured so long.

He but usurped this life.'

Bell goes. Hector sits up
.

Hector

‘I have a journey, sir, shortly to go;

My master calls me, I must not say no.'

Posner
(
Edgar
)

‘The weight of this sad time we must obey

Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.'

Timms
The hitting never hurt. It was a joke. None of us cared. We lapped it up.

Crowther
He goes mad.

Lockwood
He hit me. He never hits me.

Rudge
He hits you if he likes you. He never touches me.

Dakin
(
happily
) I'm black and blue.

Scripps It's true what he said. I did believe in God.

Nobody else does. Like stamp collecting, it seems to have gone out and I suspect even the vicar thinks I am a freak.

But the big man is glad.

‘The Prayer Book.
Hymns Ancient and Modern
. Lucky boy!'

Staff room
.

Headmaster
Mrs Lintott, Dorothy.

Mrs
Lintott
Headmaster?

Headmaster
These Oxbridge boys. Your historians. Any special plans?

Mrs Lintott
Their A Levels are very good.

Headmaster
Their A Levels are
very
good. And that is thanks to you, Dorothy. We've never had so many. Remarkable! But what now – in teaching terms?

Mrs Lintott
More of the same?

Headmaster
Oh. Do you think so?

Mrs Lintott
It's what we've done before.

Headmaster
Quite. Without much success. No one last year. None the year before. When did we last have anyone in history at Oxford and Cambridge?

Mrs Lintott
I tend not to distinguish.

Headmaster
Between Oxford and Cambridge?

Mrs Lintott
Between centres of higher learning. Last year two at Bristol, one at York. The year before …

Headmaster
Yes, yes. I know that, Dorothy. But I am thinking league tables. Open scholarships. Reports to the Governors. I want them to do themselves justice. I want them to do you justice. Factually tip-top as your boys always are, something more is required.

Mrs Lintott
More?

Headmaster
Different.

I would call it grooming did not that have overtones of the monkey house.

‘Presentation' might be the word.

Mrs Lintott
They know their stuff. Plainly stated and properly organised facts need no presentation, surely.

Headmaster
Oh, Dorothy. I think they do.

‘The facts: serving suggestion.'

Mrs Lintott
A sprig of parsley, you mean? Or an umbrella in the cocktail? Are dons so naive?

Headmaster
Naive, Dorothy? Or human?

I am thinking of the boys. Clever, yes, remarkably so. Well taught, indubitably. But a little …
ordinaire
?

Think charm. Think polish. Think Renaissance Man.

Mrs Lintott
Yes, Headmaster.

Headmaster
Hector.

The Headmaster leaves as Hector comes in
.

Hector
Headmaster.

Mrs Lintott
Didn't you try for Cambridge?

Hector
Oxford.

I was brought up in the West Riding. I wanted somewhere new. That is to say old. So long as it was old I didn't mind where I went.

Mrs Lintott
Durham was good in that respect.

Hector
Sheffield wasn't.

Cloisters, ancient libraries … I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone. If I had gone to Oxford I'd probably never have worked out the difference.

Mrs Lintott
Durham was very good for history, it's where I had my first pizza. Other things, too, of course, but it's the pizza that stands out.

And fog, would you believe, one morning inside the cathedral. I loved it.

I wish some of them were trying to go there.

Hector
No chance.

Mrs Lintott
No. Our fearless leader has made up his mind.

And they are bright, brighter than last year's. But that's not enough apparently.

Hector
It never was, even in my day.

Mrs Lintott
Poor sods.

Scripps I'd been on playground duty, so I saw him on what must have been his first morning waiting outside the study. I thought he was a new boy, which of course he was, so I smiled.

Then Felix turned up.

Irwin is a young man, about twenty-five or so
.

Headmaster
You are?

Irwin
Irwin
.

Headmaster
Irwin?

Irwin
The supply teacher.

Headmaster
Quite so.

He beckons Irwin cagily into the study
.

Scripps
Hector had said that if I wanted to write I should keep a notebook, and there must have been something furtive about Irwin's arrival because I wrote it down. I called it clandestine, a word I'd just learnt and wasn't sure how to pronounce.

Headmaster
The examinations are in December, which gives us three months at the outside … Well, you were at Cambridge, you know the form.

Irwin
Oxford, Jesus.

Headmaster
I thought of going, but this was the fifties. Change was in the air. A spirit of adventure.

Irwin
So, where did you go?

Headmaster
I was a geographer. I went to Hull.

Irwin
Oh. Larkin.

Headmaster
Everybody says that. ‘Hull? Oh, Larkin.' I don't know about the poetry … as I say, I was a geographer … but as a librarian he was pitiless. The Himmler of the Accessions Desk. And now, we're told, women in droves.

Art. They get away with murder.

They are a likely lot, the boys. All keen. One oddity.

Rudge. Determined to try for Oxford and Christ Church of all places. No hope. Might get in at Loughborough in a bad year. Otherwise all bright. But they need polish. Edge. Your job. We are low in the league. I want to see us up there with Manchester Grammar School, Haberdashers' Aske's. Leighton Park. Or is that an open prison? No matter.

Pause
.

There is a vacancy in history.

Irwin
(
thoughtfully
) That's very true.

Headmaster
In the school.

Irwin
Ah.

Headmaster
Get me scholarships, Irwin, pull us up the table, and it is yours. I am corseted by the curriculum, but I can find you three lessons a week.

Irwin
Not enough.

Headmaster
I agree. However, Mr Hector, our long-time English master, is General Studies. There is passion there.
Or, as I prefer to call it, commitment. But not curriculum-directed. Not curriculum-directed at all.

In the circumstances we may be able to filch an hour. (
going
) You are very young.

Grow a moustache.

I am thinking classroom control.

Classroom
. Music. Posner sings some Piaf.

Hector
Où voudriez-vous travailler cet après-midi?

Rudge
Dans un garage.

Boys
Non, non.

Scripps
Pas encore. Ayez pitié de nous.