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As The History Boys comes to end on stage in London, though it will undoubtedly resurface in the provinces, and in school productions, I would be interested to hear if any one shares my view that the play is not a patch on Forty Years On (1968), not only Bennett's masterpiece, but IMHO one of the truly great plays of the post-war era. Forty Years On combined a nostalgic wistfulness about England's past, with an understanding of how things irrevocably had changed and must change, as that is the thrust of history. The great elegy at the end of Forty Years On, especially as spoken unforgettably by Gielgud in the original production - 'The crowd has found the door into the secret garden. Now they will tear up the flowers by the roots, strip the borders and strew them with paper and broken bottles' - was unforgettable. And the end of Act One as the sound of the nightingales at Kimber melts into the the sound of the guns from Flanders and the lights come up on the school corps on the stairs, the doomed youth of the 1914-1918 war.
Don't get me wrong - I found The History Boys a fascinating play, which raised many important issues, in fact that was perhaps the problem, there was a kind of scatter gun approach, so many targets, so little time. I saw it in its original version at the National, with a second cast at the National, and at Warwick on tour with Stephen Moore, the best of all the Hectors. I must be the only person who felt that the film was actually better than the play, sharper, more in focus, less sentimental. And then at the weekend, Charles Moore articulated many of my feelings in his weekly article in the Daily Telegraph, pointing out that Alan Bennett was usually so sure in his irony and subtle in his effects, but that The History Boys was crude, even vulgar. I quite agree. As the Headmaster said in Forty Years On, 'When a society has to go to the lavatory for its humour then the writing is really on the wall.' Not one line in The History Boys matches that. Certainly not 'History is one f****** thing after another.' Would be very interested to hear what others think. The problem is that Forty Years On has not been seen for a while, but a revival certainly would put The History Boys in its true perspective.
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