CCADS - The History Boys

CCADS, The History Boys, Portsmouth New Theatre Royal, September 9th

Of Alan Bennett's long and impressive list of plays, I'd guess that The History Boys has been the most successful. Its long London stage run, then film and radio productions was added to by Portsmouth's consistently fine amateur company, Corpus Christi Amateur Dramatic Society.
While on the one hand it is an essay on the value of a traditional liberal arts education in the face of recent results-based approaches to proving education's worth, it also continues an established Bennett thread through such works as Me ! I'm Afraid of Virginia Woolf and The Laying on of Hands that use the theme of somewhat inappropriate homoerotic relationships between older men and younger boys.
There is much more to it than that, though, as Bennett incorporates any number of literary, historical and linguistic ideas into the classroom and poetry anoraks can tick off the references to major C20th English poets through Hardy, Housman, Owen, Eliot, Auden, Stevie Smith and Larkin. So it is a ready made compendium of curricular standards that would suffice for a highly respectable General Studies course on its own.
Portsmouth's finest character actor, Tony Dart, finds another well-befitting role in Hector, the maverick literature teacher, while John Paul McCrohon is as better than ever as Irwin, the supply teacher. Tony Doye and Sue McCrohon are excellent, too, but somehow they found eight talented teenage boys to fill the boys' roles thoroughly impressively, singing, playing the piano and acting their moody, truculent teenage socks off.
For me, to be painfully critical, the play took a long time to end and ten minutes could have been removed from it to greater effect but that is Bennett's fault, perhaps wringing more pathos and emotion out of the ending than is really needed but the production is a major triumph, possibly the best out of many years of CCADS performances. Not only due to the fact that it is one of Alan Bennett's most complete plays but the all-round relish and panache of this re-making of it.

Ends Saturday. Get there if you can.

http://ccads.musicdramastage.com/