The History Boys has been hugely popular both on stage and as a film. “Wonderfully it blends wit and wisdom, now with knockabout humour, now with pain,” wrote Alistair Macaulay in the FT in December 2005. There have been plenty of English plays about schools – what makes Bennett’s unusual is that it is about the actual process of teaching: we see the play’s two intellectual protagonists, Hector and Irwin, at work in the classroom. The play shows us eight grammar school boys trying to win scholarships to Oxbridge in the 1980s, and along the way gives us a fascinating debate about history, literature and the purpose of education itself.
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