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Alan Bennett And Some Of The Cast In Discussion About The History Boys EDUCATION, EDUCATION, EDUCATION “It was a shock to me as a schoolboy to find the teachers were actually human beings,” says writer Alan Bennett. Like the History Boys, Bennett attended a state school (Leeds Modern) in the North of England and was put forward for Oxford and Cambridge by an ambitious headmaster. Unlike the History Boys, he was not prepared for the entrance exams by a charismatic, inspirational teacher such as Hector or groomed by a flashy young scholar like Irwin. “My own teacher at the state school I went to was more like Mrs. Lintott,” says Bennett. “He was a good teacher and a decent man but he just taught you facts, facts, facts. The notion of a journalistic approach to answering a question or of turning the question on its head, or doing it in an eye-catching way would have been totally foreign to him. He wouldn’t really have known how or where to start with that. Nobody really gave us any guidance as to what to do so we had to find our own way. And that’s partly what the story’s about.” In the absence of any instruction in the art of passing exams, Bennett taught himself to clear the academic hurdles. In his foreword to the published play, the author describes how he ‘cheated’ to get a scholarship to Oxford: “I reduced everything I knew to a set of notes with answers to possible questions and odd, eye-catching quotations all written out on a series of forty or fifty correspondence cards, a handful of which I carried in my pocket everywhere I went.” These ‘minced morsels’ were duly regurgitated for his General Paper and Bennett won his scholarship. Preparing for his final examinations in History at Oxford, Bennett discovered another technique, that of taking an idea and turning it on its head in order to grab attention. Again, his methods paid off and Bennett was awarded a First. “In a sense,” he says, “I am Irwin”. Having studied under a Mrs Lintott and having only later discovered the Irwin technique on his own in order to excel at exams, Bennett recalls being bored at school, never certain what the point of it was or what it had to do with him. Arriving at university, he met students (mostly from fee-paying schools) who spoke with great affection of eccentric, impassioned teachers who inspired their pupils with an equal passion for learning but he had never personally encountered one. “If I had had somebody who could enthuse me as obviously Hector could, then I would have seen the point of it more,” Bennett says. “There are people who do that but I only ever met one throughout the whole of my schooling. Right at the end of my time at Oxford, I had a supervisor who taught medieval history and he made medieval history seem the one thing in the world that was worth doing. Medieval history is, to say the least, a very marginal subject but he made it seem as if that and that alone was the thing worth living for. There are teachers like that still, they survive even in the terrible conditions of teaching today but I never had one when I was a boy and I suppose that’s why I tried to write one.” The History Boys is about the nature and purpose of education, the use of literature, how we teach and how we are taught. It manages to be raucously funny while addressing the very serious business of the passing on of wisdom to the next generation. Although not explicitly so, it is also a political piece because, according to Bennett: “It’s about education which is a central question in politics”. In addition, because Bennett is a master observer and an accomplished miniaturist, THE HISTORY BOYS’ classroom can be seen not only as a microcosm of its educational system but also a metaphor for the state of the nation itself. Bennett set his story in the early 1980s partly for practical reasons (the ‘seventh term’ Oxbridge exams were abolished thereafter) but chiefly for thematic ones (during the Thatcherite ‘80s, the struggle between humanist and utilitarian approaches to education came to a head). “These days, an off-curriculum, off-piste teacher like Hector within the state school system is no longer conceivable,” says director Nicholas Hytner. “My education at Manchester Grammar School was almost identical to the education that these boys had. I think my teachers were less overtly cynical than Irwin but I went to school in the ‘70s and Irwin is very much a product of the ‘80s. Irwin’s denial that there is such a thing as objective truth, his swashbuckling relativism, is a more recent phenomenon but my teachers, enthusiastic though they were for their subjects, were still anxious that we should do well.” Both Bennett and Hytner sat the ‘seventh term’ Oxbridge entrance exams, some 25 years apart, Bennett in History and Hytner in English. “I was part of a group of about eight or 10 kids trying to get into Oxford and Cambridge to read English,” says Hytner. “In the next-door classroom, there were eight or 10 kids trying to get in to read history.” Producer Kevin Loader was also a state school boy who sat the seventh term Oxbridge exam and like Alan Bennett, went on to teach university under-graduates for a time. “The scary thing about the Cambridge entrance exams was a thing called the ‘General Studies Paper’,” he recalls. “As Hector says, there’s no such thing as general studies; it’s a complete waste of time. But actually, General Studies was completely terrifying because you would sit this essay exam where you were asked to write about very generalized things for which you could do no revision. It was all about how you thought, how you used your knowledge; it wasn’t necessarily about what you knew. Clearly, that’s one of the things Alan explores in THE HISTORY BOYS, whether education is about marshalling facts in an interesting way rather than just learning them.” “I felt my education only began after I’d left school, after I’d left university,” Bennett says. “I mean, even in an absolutely practical way. I don’t, for instance, remember reading a book through from start to finish until a fair time after I’d left university, when we went to New York with BEYOND THE FRINGE which was in 1962. Coming back on the boat, I read, ‘Bleak House’ or ‘Great Expectations’. That was the first time I’d read a book from start to finish and I kept thinking as I was reading, ‘Oh, I’m enjoying this, and yet it’s a classic’. I’d somehow thought of the classics of literature as something apart from me, something to do with academic life and not something you enjoyed. It took me a long, long time to learn something you really ought to learn at school but not many people do.” Richard Griffiths who plays the charismatic ‘General Studies’ teacher, Hector, agrees. “Most people in this country who go to university are not going there to learn anything. They go in order to finish growing up. Usually, it’s the first time in their lives that they’ve been away from home. They are 18, everything works, they’re lusty and full of juice. They go to university and for three years, the parents don’t quite know what they are doing and the teachers don’t quite seem to care. When I went to university, I just mainly had a ball. I studied like crazy for ten minutes to pass the exams and the rest of it was just goofing around doing plays and trying to get laid.” “As far as the film’s treatment of education goes,” says Nicholas Hytner, “Embodied in it are people for whom education is simply about results. At the very extreme level, the Headmaster is interested in meeting and exceeding targets. Then there’s Irwin who keeps the boys riveted by his inventiveness and his freedom from the constraints of traditional historical truth. He’s also concerned with getting them where they want to be and that’s no bad thing. Hector, on the other hand, says he has no concern for getting them where they want to be. He uses his classroom as a place where their minds can be opened and their spirits touched by the poetry which resonates with him, even though sometimes he can’t say why. That’s great, but it also has its drawbacks. I think there is a place in the classroom for asking exactly why a poem is touching, and exactly how it does what it does. I think it could be said that it’s sentimental nonsense merely to allow a poem to enter at some subliminal level and resonate.” Bennett concedes that although he is temperamentally attracted to the sort of teaching represented by Hector, it isn’t particularly practical and probably wouldn’t help a student to pass a test, a theory borne out by the academic career of producer Damian Jones who attended a fee-paying school: “I think I had the imagination and the ability to embrace the education for life. It was the education to pass exams that I had trouble with,” he says ruefully. “I probably needed an Irwin but unfortunately or fortunately, I had more Hectors…” “It’s certainly true today, even more than it was when I was at school, that there just isn’t time to read a book from start to finish,” says Alan Bennett. “As one of the boys says in our film, you just have to get ‘the gist of it’. ‘Give us the gist of it! That’s all we want. Just for the exam!’ That’s what exams are about - getting away with it. Hector’s notion that literature is wonderful and has to do with your life and can show you things that you’ll get nowhere else - that didn’t come to me until long after I’d left university.” When asked why he chose to give Hector the ‘tragic flaw’ of his attraction to his pupils, Bennett replies: “It seemed true to his character, really. It seemed right and in a way, it made him an innocent. The boys in the story are 18 and I think they are actually much wiser than Hector. Their attitude to him is one of weary tolerance - this entirely ineffectual groping they get on the back of his motorbike doesn’t alarm them or seem to damage them - they just are bored with it. At the same time - and this may be a romantic notion - they like him so they don’t shop him. They just put up with it and think it’s one of the facts of life. I don’t think that’s necessarily so far from the truth.” “There’s a huge amount that’s attractive about the way Hector teaches,” says Nicholas Hytner. “At an emotional level, it’s very easy to respond to him and it’s harder to respond to Irwin, or to Mrs. Lintott. But the film is by no means an unequivocal endorsement of Hector’s approach. It’s a debate that doesn’t have a clear conclusion - it doesn’t even ask the audience to come to a conclusion. But it does ask the audience to think quite deeply about what it’s discussing.” EDUCATING THE HISTORY BOYS “From the moment we started at the National Theatre, we went into what felt like a classroom,” says Dominic Cooper who plays Dakin, in some respects the most worldly of the History Boys and coincidentally, the character Alan Bennett suggests bears the least resemblance to himself. “It was a huge lesson on lots of things that we, as actors, unfortunately hadn’t learnt in school. Our education let us down in some ways but from the moment we started rehearsals, we were learning what these characters know inside out.” When Alan Bennett first delivered his script to Nicholas Hytner, although certain characters were developed (Dakin, Posner and Scripps) the other History Boys’ dialogue was attributed to ‘Boy 1’, ‘Boy 2’ and so on. Their characters developed based on the extensive rehearsal process and in particular, in the ersatz classroom established at the National to give the young actors the education they needed to become fluent in the language and references of the play. The classroom/rehearsal room also enabled the cast to develop the camaraderie, casual intimacy, and playful antagonism of students who spend all day, every day together. “The play is full of literary references which an average schoolboy would not know now,” says Bennett. “It’s full of references to literary figures, poets and novelists and so on, figures of English culture from the last 200 years or so. The actors needed to know about these if only in order to play boys who did know about them. Nicholas Hytner and I almost conducted tutorials about the subjects that occur in the play. I know actors and they don’t like a lot of talking before you start rehearsal, they like to get started. But in this case, I think it was essential and it had another function in the sense that they got to know one another and they became a class. You picked out the ones who were quieter than the others and the ones who were more self-assertive. This was really beneficial to the play as a whole.” “I learned so many names and not just the names but what they were responsible for,” says Samuel Anderson who plays Crowther. “We touched on World War I in school when I was about 13 or 14 and I remembered the outcome but I didn’t really remember how it started so it was brilliant to get all that back again. We also had a morning of poetry reading when we started rehearsals for the play. I hadn’t done anything like that since school and back then it was crap, the teachers just depressed you with it. But hearing great actors delivering poetry, I thought, “Oh, that’s what they meant!’” “The first stages of rehearsal at the National were like school and I absolutely loved being a teacher,” says Hytner. “I had no idea what Alan was writing about before the play arrived. I never do. This is the fourth of his plays that I’ve directed - our working relationship goes back now to 1989 - but I never know what he’s up to. When this arrived, it felt like my schooldays. It was an amalgam of his schooldays back in the ‘50s, mine in the ‘70s, and the school- days of the boys that it’s written about in the ‘80s. But what they’re talking about, the lessons they’re taught, are obviously what Alan knows and is passionate about, and that happened to be true for me as well. Being able to teach Hardy, Larkin, Eliot and Auden (poets that, it has to be said, Alan has taught to the nation through his Channel 4 TV shows) was a taste of a career I’d love to have had. What I do and what teachers do very often overlaps, but never so explicitly as in this rehearsal period. It was great to be able to take a group of kids through what I’d been taught and enjoyed.” The rehearsal process enabled Alan Bennett to fill in some of the ‘caricatures’ he had sketched, using elements of the actors’ personalities to inform the characters as they developed. He also used the young actors as barometers of the ‘modernity’ of the dialogue. “I don’t know that I understand boys now,” says Bennett. “Things have changed so much. But the boys in the play are from the same social level as I was from. I didn’t try to write like the 80s as it were, in a self-consciously modern way. I just wrote true to the character of the boys and trusted that if anything sounded old-fashioned or over-literary, then the actors would smooth it out themselves - which they did. You also learnt what sort of characters they were. For instance, James Corden is very funny and so you found yourself writing funnier lines simply for the pleasure of hearing him do them.” “Without question, Timms is the closest character that I’ve played to myself in anything I’ve done,” says James Corden, the self-confessed class clown. “Alan has taken parts of Andy and added them to Lockwood, taken parts of Sam and added them to Crowther and so on. The script has influenced us in how we behave and I think we’ve influenced Alan in the way he wrote the characters. Any of the boys can go, ‘Alan, do you think this is a better line?’ to Alan Bennett! This is one of the greatest living playwrights and here’s these young whippersnappers going, ‘I’ve got a better idea, I think’. And sometimes Alan says, ‘Yeah, that is better’. Amazing!” “It was almost by chance that we got a cast in which each person is very different, each person has a very strong character,” says Bennett. “We weren’t particularly striving for that but we just got a cast in which everybody could do it. Normally there’s a weak link, somebody who is not as good as the others and has to be helped along. But here, they were all competent, they all got along, they knew what they could do. I remember when Sacha Dhawan who plays Ahktar and Andrew Knott who plays Lockwood came down to audition on the train from Manchester. They were really wired and on edge somehow and, of course, you realised it meant an enormous amount to them that they got the part. They both read well but then Sacha, at the end of the audition, asked if he could read a poem - he’d written this poem about the play. And I think it was probably that that got him the part. I mean, not specifically, as he is a very good actor but he was just so keen to get it that you hadn’t the heart to refuse him, really. Of course, I probably identified with that since I’m from the North and Sacha and Andrew obviously thought coming to London was a big deal.” “Because I’m from Manchester, the whole London scene and working at the National Theatre was a huge thing for me,” says Sacha Dhawan. “And so was working with Alan Bennett because he was a writer I studied for my final exams! What’s great about Alan is you’d think he was in rehearsals because he wanted the play to be done a certain way, staged in a certain way, but in reality he was there for our benefit, to make sure that we understood what we were saying.” Although, at least in the abstract, all of the History Boys confess to being in awe of Alan Bennett and his work, they very quickly lost any of the shyness they may initially have felt in the presence of the man they nicknamed ‘AB’. Bennett recalls that the young actors’ admiration for his work never extended to treating him with the deference normally accorded to people his of age and reputation. Instead, the author cheerily admits that from the outset, “they took the piss out of me relentlessly”. “There wasn't a honeymoon period when there was a bit of respect, not to say veneration,” Bennett says. “There was never any at all. The first day, when I was coming in to the theatre, Dominic Cooper was lounging in the stage door and someone said ‘What are you doing here, Dominic?’ and he said ‘Oh, I'm in this crap play about history by – what's the guy's name? Oh, hello, Alan.’" There are, of course, plenty of precedents for the actors’ irreverence toward their elders in Bennett’s script which, as producer Kevin Loader explains, is in keeping with his own experience as a seventh term student: “I think one of the things that Alan’s captured very well is this strange zone that these boys are in between taking their last state school exams - their A-levels - and doing their Oxbridge entrance exams. You have this intermediate status where you are still a schoolboy, but you’re almost an undergraduate student and you’re staying on at school in a voluntary way. I remember that your relationship with the staff does change so that some of the backchat, the wit and the hard time the boys give their teachers seems to me completely appropriate to that moment in the madness of their education.” Loader also describes the social commentary implicit in the boys’ attitude toward those in authority: “As with much of Alan’s work, there is a class comedy about people from unlikely backgrounds trying to break through, to do things their parents would not have done. So what you’ve got here is a group of schoolboys, quite possibly none of whose parents had gone to university, trying to get into the top two schools in the country. There’s a feistiness about them which is entirely appropriate to that moment in social history.” As for their ‘roles’ as teachers and whether he and Bennett were preparing the boys to pass a test or preparing them for life, Hytner says, “There is always an end in sight to education. The end in sight, as far as we were concerned was the opening night of a play. I hope Alan and I provided a little bit of Hector, but I possibly provided more of Irwin because I was the one who was responsible for getting everything up and running.” “You realise how little you appreciated being educated when there are two people, Nick Hytner and Alan Bennett, who have this wealth of information without referring to any book; they just know the answers to all the questions you come out with,” says Cooper. “Many of the references to poetry in the script, Alan knows off the top of his head. We didn’t know any of them and I began to realise that I should have appreciated that time more, when people were doing that for me for free in school and I was not paying any attention whatsoever.” “The great thing about actors is they never stop learning,” says Hytner. “I think the vast majority of university graduates, once they’re through at university, just stop - they stop reading, they stop finding out, they lose their interest in their subject. Actors never lose their curiosity. They love taking on new experiences, new lives - you know how boring it is, listening to the ones who have been through boot camp for an army movie telling you about how amazing boot camp was with that kind of blithe and attractive innocence as if nobody - not even the army! - has ever gone through boot camp before. Well, my lot went through A-level English and A-level history. Less glamorous and physically less taxing, but much more fun, I suspect.” STAGE TO SCREEN “The play was rehearsed in depth when we first staged it and not much more than a year later, we made the film,” says Nicholas Hytner. “In my experience, films can take years and years and years and sometimes, by the time they get made all passion is spent. But I think that Alan wrote the play quickly, in a flash of inspiration, and it’s a play that we never lost our enthusiasm for. In the process of translating it from the stage to film – of rethinking how to tell the story, re-conceiving it, re-visualizing it - there was never any slackening of momentum.” Although Hytner and Bennett decided early on to make a film of THE HISTORY BOYS, they didn’t reveal their intentions or actively seek the involvement of other parties until they had a finished screenplay, budget, and schedule. They knew that they would have a window of opportunity prior to the world tour of the play and during the English school holidays that would enable them to shoot in an actual school closed for the summer. Most importantly, they knew that whoever they made the film with would have to agree to make the film of the National Theatre production. “It doesn’t happen very often that a play is cast perfectly in every respect,” says Hytner. “When that does happen, material which is already rich and resonant simply becomes richer. The combination of the parts as written on the page and what is recreated every night by imaginative actors getting right under the skin of what they’re doing keeps it more than alive. There was no way we were going make this without the cast that we’d been working with for the previous 12 months.” Kevin Loader and Damian Jones were approached to produce the film that Hytner and Bennett wanted to make. “What we brought to the party was a knowledge of how to make this film for a small budget and give them the kind of absolute creative freedom that they wanted,” says Loader. “Kevin and Damian very skilfully put together a financial package and those who got involved – BBC Films, DNA and Fox Searchlight - were 100% supportive of the notion that we would continue down the road that we had already set out on,” says Hytner. Hytner and Bennett had previously and very successfully made the transition from stage to screen for their Oscar and BAFTA winning production of The Madness of King George which also began life at the National Theatre. However, Hector’s 20th century English classroom demanded a different approach to the 18th century English court of George III. “When we made The Madness of King George, the film was a response to what the play referred to,” says Hytner. “The final scene took place outside Saint Paul’s Cathedral in April of 1789 at the service of Thanksgiving for the King’s restoration to health. Now, on stage you can suggest that with a flight of steps and a way with a hat. But film is an unashamedly literal medium. Although you always hope that the literal image will have some resonance beyond itself, on film, St. Paul’s Cathedral is St. Paul’s Cathedral. On The Madness of King George, which was my first film, I learned that film also offers the opportunity for a degree of interiority that you can rarely if ever get on the stage. The world of THE HISTORY BOYS is an enclosed one and historically, film has always done very well in enclosed worlds like prisons, hospitals, army bases, and schools. We very rarely travel outside the school in our film because what we’re really interested in is the world inside the characters: their desires, their aspirations, their frustrations, their ideas.” “I just cut out bits that I didn’t think were appropriate or which wouldn’t work and Nick cut out more,” says Alan Bennett. “I then put in the extra bits I felt we needed to fill out the canvas - I wrote in a few characters simply because you needed to see the headmaster knocking about and you needed to see people in the staffroom scenes. I wrote a brief scene (though she makes it a very good one) in the art department with Penelope Wilton as the art mistress. And I added a terribly religious P.E. instructor played by Adrian Scarborough who’s slightly drawn from somebody who was at school in my time. I never liked P.E. at all, so I was probably biased…” “Alan understood instinctively that there wasn’t much point in opening out THE HISTORY BOYS, to start cutting up something that was working so brilliantly for audiences at the National in pursuit of some bogus cinematic quality,” says Kevin Loader. “The transition from stage to screen in this case is that the film makes you feel closer to these characters; it makes you more involved with their emotional stories and gives you the chance to exploit the amazing detail of these performances to the hilt.” “You trusted Richard Griffiths and Frances de la Tour and the boys individually to tell the story, really,” says Bennett. “You didn’t want to take it apart or expand it in a way which would dilute it. You get glimpses of the boys’ parents very occasionally but if you’d shown them at home or filmed their lives, it wouldn’t have helped. It’s not about that. It’s about what they’re doing in the classroom and their parents are incidental to that in the way that we tell the story.” “For me it was wonderfully exciting to try and make a film out of very bright people who spark ideas off each other, who riff off each other intellectually, trying to outsmart each other with great wit and joie de vivre but with an underlying seriousness,” says Hytner. “We tried to reflect that in the way we shot it and in the way we cut it. But we also tried to reflect that by sometimes being as still as it’s possible to be, as static as you dare to be in a film. I’m thinking particularly of the scene where Hector and Posner discuss ‘Drummer Hodge’ together and unpeel their hearts, revealing themselves obliquely through discussing something else, in this case a poem by Thomas Hardy. It’s more or less exactly the same scene on stage and screen, barely cut at all. The difference is that every night on stage, they included 1,000 people in a very intimate conversation.” Two locations were found for the world of the History Boys, with Watford Girls Grammar School and Watford Boys Grammar School in a London suburb standing in for Cutler’s Grammar School in Sheffield. The producers’ vague concerns that the cast might not as easily pass for schoolboys on screen as they had on stage were put to rest on the day when a group of the actors played a game of football during a break in filming at Watford Boys Grammar. “Summer school was in session across the way and a strident teacher’s voice called to the cast members from a nearby window: Put that ball away and get back to class immediately!” recalls Damian Jones. Among the actors, both the film debutants and the old hands recognised the benefit of the extended rehearsal period provided by the actual rehearsals and the sold-out run at the National Theatre. “It’s a wonderful luxury just to be able to rattle off the dialogue without thinking what comes next,” says Richard Griffiths. “The difference between film and the stage is essentially one of scale and everybody’s had to scale down what they do to do smaller, more intense versions of it because the camera sees everything and mustn’t be yelled at or abused or have its intelligence taken for granted.” “It was so much more relaxed because 90% of making a film seems to be getting to know the other actors,” says Stephen Campbell Moore who plays the new-model teacher, Irwin. “We obviously toned down things that were very theatrical even on stage but we know it back to front. You don’t have to worry whether you are in character or not because over a period of a year and a half, it kind of takes you over. You never have to think, ‘Would Irwin speak like this or do this or walk like this?’ because you have been doing it for so long you’ll be lucky if you don’t stay like that for the rest of your life.” Samuel Barnett who plays the lovelorn Posner agrees: “I sometimes think I’ll never play anything else. It’s just been mammoth, doing the play at the National Theatre, then making the film, then a regional tour and back to the National before the world tour and Broadway…three years of my life playing Posner. It’s amazing to be able to go into such depth with a character, a real gift.” THE HOLY GRAIL To this day, Alan Bennett recalls going to Cambridge to take the entrance exam more than 50 years ago: “It was almost the first time I’d ever been away from home. It happened to be in December and it was very, very cold; there was a hard frost over everything. Cambridge is a beautiful place at the best of times but then, it just looked wonderful. I came from Leeds which was as black as Cambridge was white in the sense that Leeds was covered in soot and smoke - an industrial city – whereas Cambridge was like a wedding cake, so white and icy and wonderful.” Bennett is quick to add, however, that this first impression was the lasting one and he has no particular nostalgia for his student days. He has said that he only began to feel any genuine ‘intellectual stirrings’ while in the army doing his National Service at the Joint Services School for Linguists and believes that his real education began some years after that. These sentiments are echoed by Bennett’s fellow Oxbridge graduates and collaborators on The History Boys. “Who we are, what we become, is the consequence of so many different influences,” says Nicholas Hytner. “Sure, our education has a lot to do with it but much less than we’re encouraged to believe when we’re chasing those results, when we’re chasing university entrance. It was the most important thing in the world to me that I got into Cambridge. I got in, I loved it. Since I’ve left, nobody’s ever asked me where I went to school. The voices of Mrs. Lintott and Hector are both very strong in the script, suggesting that it really doesn’t matter one way or the other. In no sense does the film believe, or do any of them at the end of the film believe, that those two universities are the be all and end all. They aren’t. But the boys are told it matters and so they chase it.” “You probably do go up thinking that your university years are going to control and shape your life but then you realise the minute you leave that actually, of course they aren’t,” says Kevin Loader. “Your life is about what happens after that.” “That’s kind of what Hector is trying to say,” says Richard Griffiths. “It’s not about some poxy exam or some course at university. Life is about life.” More: Synopsis of The History Boys |