It’s weird to see Frances de la Tour, who played a (French) teacher in one of the Harry Potter movies, playing a teacher at a more realistic school — an all-boys’ grammar school in 1980s Britain. No magical gymnastics this time; in The History Boys, she’s a history teacher.
The History Boys also stars Richard Griffiths, who plays Harry Potter’s vile Uncle Vernon. Because of his piggy features and massive girth, Griffiths gets that kind of role a lot, so it’s good to see him taking a major part here — and making a meal of it.
The Griffiths character, known as Hector to all, teaches “general studies”. What this means is anything he and the boys feel like. Declaiming poetry is a favourite pastime, as are acting out old movie climaxes or singing chansons. Beloved by the boys despite his peccadilloes, Hector is the teacher who is more interested in art than ambition, who puts some polish on the boys, letting them range freely through the myriad worlds of culture high and low.
But he is to be sidelined. The eight lads in their final year are up for places at Britain’s most hallowed tertiary-educational institutions, Oxford and Cambridge, and the ambitious headmaster (Clive Merrison) is determined that they should stand the best possible chance of winning such places. For that to happen, he needs the boys to get a lot less arty Hectoring and more hard-nosed training in the ways of the Oxbridge acceptance system.
To that purpose, he hires a new teacher (Stephen Campbell Moore), and of course that’s going to upset the apple cart as far as the other teachers are concerned. What plays out from there is complex and beautifully organised, an entirely gripping agon between different ways of teaching, different kinds of ambitions and different kinds of relationship between teacher and pupil.
The movie is based on Alan Bennett’s prize-winning and commercially successful stage play, and is directed by Nicholas Hytner, who effectively brought another Bennett hit to the screen as The Madness of King George in 1994. The History Boys bears the marks of its theatrical origins, but is not really much the worse for it. If it feels a little claustrophobic and indoors, perhaps that is apt in the context, and one of its great joys is the kind of sparky, witty dialogue that one seldom hears in movies, unless they’re written by Woody Allen or David Mamet.
The young actors playing the eight boys function perfectly together, which is not surprising: they’ve been transplanted directly from the stage version. There is a touch of tokenism in the characterisation, with a fat boy, a black boy, a gay boy and the class heart-throb all present and correct — but at least we get a good spread of characters, and many of their interactions are priceless.
What’s a bit creepy is that the class is a little too much of a repressed gay teacher’s wet dream. All the boys are clever, sharp-tongued, cultured, tolerant and entertaining; only one seems interested in girls, and he’s not having any of the usual adolescent difficulties with sex, while also being prepared to swing somewhat if required. This lot of boys could not be more different from the kinds of pupils who appear in the American picture of high school, which is either a matter of sexy angst in sun-drenched, affluent California or guns’n’drugs amid desperate inner-city grit.
No, this is another world altogether. The History Boys is nominally set in the early 1980s, but there’s little sign of the surrounding culture — no one rushes off to an Adam Ant concert in a silly New Romantic hairdo and frilly pirate chic. The period of the movie feels much more like the 1950s of Bennett’s own school-going years, and what happens to the gay boy (as revealed in the final coda) also feels like something from 50 years ago rather than 20.
But none of those things spoil one’s enjoyment of the movie. Campbell Moore comes across as somewhat lacking in personality, but he is up against the likes of Griffiths, who simply steals the picture from everyone else. Well, he steals it, but he also, generously, leaves much space for the boys — as a good teacher would.