The History Boys

AS a Leeds grammar-school boy pre-paring to take a scholarship exam for Oxford, Alan Bennett worked out a clever system of reducing ‘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 wherever I went.

- Alan Bennett and Jack Watkins

It worked. Mr Bennett passed the exam and eventually graduated from Exeter College with a first-class degree in history. But he admitted that, although he had unconsciously stumbled upon an effective technique for passing exams, ‘ever since then I’d felt I was a fraud, that I wasn’t as clever as I seemed to be’. The History Boys was thus written out of what he described as ‘a mild sense of guilt’.

The play revolves around a group of sixth-form lads gearing up for an Oxbridge entrance exam in the 1980s. There are plenty of opportunities for all the larky, leg-pulling humor you’d expect from quick-witted, highly opinionated, and boisterous teenagers. However, Mr. Bennett’s guilt excision, such as it is, seems to have been reflected in two of the teachers who, without pushing the point too far, might represent the playwright’s alter egos.