Crackling intellectual energy

The Browsers ecstasy

This play-turned-movie about a brilliant, maverick school teacher and his ferociously gifted students is full of wit and erudition, and crackles with intellectual energy. Written by one of Britain’s most interesting playwrights, Alan Bennett, The History Boys is a universal story of teachers and students. Most of us should be able to relate to the teacher here because we’ve all had an extraordinary teacher who once dazzled us. Here, he’s played by Richard Griffiths, a portly, charming 60-year-old English teacher nicknamed Hector, who speaks beautifully. If this film sounds like Goodbye Mr Chips, To Sir With Love or Dead Poets Society, you are wrong. Bennett’s teacher-student tale is edgy stuff: irreverent, bawdy, modern.

Very little is forbidden in Hector’s classroom: if students want to smoke or use expletives or act risqué to demonstrate a scene or an idea or just indulge in ‘calculated silliness’, Hector is entertained, urging them on with quiet chuckles from the back. Hector is passionate about knowledge for the sake of it, and asks the boys to remember that ‘apart from love, it is the only education worth having.’ He’s inspired his students to memorise poems and lines from various novels, plays, movies and even songs. He has them enact the endings from classic movies and bets that he’ll guess them for 50 pence.

And he wins. While the students respect and like Hector, they can also be mean to him, talk behind his back, back-answer and jeer at him in class. Only one of the eight students, Posner, who, if not the brightest, is the keenest, shows complete devotion. 

The ‘history boys’ are strange in the way they show their gratitude to Hector for how much fun he has made learning — they take turns being dropped home on his motorbike, riding pillion as he gropes and fondles them on the way. Now, we haven’t seen Sidney Poitier or Robert Donat or Robin Williams sneak a quick grope when they are alone with their students, let alone their male students; nor are we likely to see the boys from these movies allow such homosexual passes. But, in The History Boys, this little detail is never fussed over, but played hilariously and subtly off the cuff; a naughty joke we share with Hector and the students as if to roll our eyes and say, ‘Oh the little things we have to do for our teachers.’ 

When Hector is eventually ratted out to the philistine, vinegary headmaster of this public school, Hector offers in his defense: ‘The transmission of knowledge is itself an erotic act.’ It’s surprising and lovely to see a lengthy scene (seven whole minutes) about a ritual Hector and Posner have after school hours where each student memorises a poem, recites it to Hector, and then they sit down and talk about the poem. Posner is very sure he is gay, and has a crush on the most handsome student in class.

But it’s unrequited love (strangely Posner is the only student Hector won’t take pillion with him, as if that would be to corrupt him). For this tutorial, Posner recites a Thomas Hardy poem whose central thought is a sense of holding back, of diffidence. 

Hector points out how Hardy is fond of compound adjectives, which can be got by adding a ‘un’ before a noun or verb such as ‘un-coffined’, ‘un-kissed’, un-embraced’, ‘un-rejoicing’. Posner tells Hector that he feels the poem speaks to his condition. Hector is quiet for a while and then says, ‘The best moments in reading are when you come across something — a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things — which you had thought special and particular to you.

Now, here it is, set down by someone else…and it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours. The plot, as such, emerges when the headmaster becomes ambitious and wants Hector’s band of bright students to prepare for the entrance tests for Oxford and Cambridge. 

The headmaster thinks literature is a waste of time. He hires a young, modern Oxbridge educated teacher to coach the students in history and general studies, and asks Hector to give away some of his classes and share the timetable with the new man, Irwin. Irwin asks his students to go beyond just reciting poetry to questioning everything they learn.

Once the students (except Posner) come under his influence, they begin challenging Hector in the classroom. Bennett doesn’t sympathise more with Hector; he simply presents two ways of teaching and learning. But you can see Hector’s way of teaching is already disappearing.   
     
The ensemble acting by the students is terrific, so are the performances of all the actors who play the teachers. Richard Griffiths is the most marvellous of course; a marvellous actor playing a marvellous role. The History Boys is a rousing, complex and joyous dramatisation of the teacher-student relationship. It makes knowledge, language and intellect sexy and seductive. It’s also about the tragedy and futility of the teaching process. However, sometimes just one student will imbibe it truly and pass it on. ‘And sometimes, that’s all we can do,’ Hector tells us ‘to pass it on.’ Posner, of course, is the one who takes after Hector and becomes a teacher. In one word, he reveals what
is at the heart of the student-teacher relationship: ‘I…share.’