Alan Bennet’s The History Boys debuted nearly twenty years ago, in 2004, to rapturous reviews. It picked up Olivier and Tony awards, among others, and launched the careers of Dominic Cooper, James Corden, and Russell Tovey. This acclaim was further bolstered by a film in 2006, adapted by Bennett himself, and featuring most of the original cast. Despite its notability, I had seen neither the film nor the play until I attended the opening night of Peedie Productions’ take at the Keble O’Reilly yesterday evening.

The year is 1983, and our setting is an English all-boys grammar school, with a mostly working-class student body. Our cast is eight bright - if adrift - sixth-formers who rally around their eccentric English and General Studies teacher, Hector (Tom Vallely) - whose scattershot, unconventional classes encourage the boys to reject hierarchies in art, memorize poems for their own sake, and think outside the box. Meanwhile, snobbish headmaster Felix (Archie Inns) realises that this philosophy is severely limiting the prospect of any of Hector’s pupils getting into Oxbridge (and thereby boosting his school’s reputation), so he employs a straightlaced young supply teacher, Irwin (Alex Fagan) to whip the students into shape.

A long battle of wills ensues, punctuated by witty banter, and playful renditions of scenes and songs from old musicals (Hector has an ongoing 50p bet with two of the boys that he will be able to recognize whatever piece they are pastiching), as well as great heapings of teenage angst and a non-zero amount of molestation.

The latter of these topics is at the thorny heart of the play: Hector is found out to have been groping his students’ private parts whilst couriering them around on his motorbike. These incidents are treated with an uneasy glibness, which seems a plausible reaction among the students (who treat it as if it’s just another tiresome eccentricity). However, by the end of the piece, you feel as though Bennett himself has somewhat shrugged it off, as a semi-understandable reaction to being a closeted man in 1980s Yorkshire. I found myself wishing the play had leaned more into investigating Hector's complicated anti-heroism, as it’s clear his teaching style, while in some ways beneficial, is also something of a platform for his own grandiosity and need for validation.

Discomfiting flirtations weave through the whole work: the class playboy Dakin (a standout performance from Tom Anderson, who grounds the role in calm confidence) is having a secret fling with the headmaster’s secretary, and later in the piece, he also propositions Irwin, who we learn is gay as well and struggling to accept it. While it’s great to see an unquestionably bisexual male character, the power dynamics feel uncomfortable. In 2004, the idea of dalliances between either a student in his late teens and a teacher in his early 20s, and also particularly between a teenage boy and a grown woman, would’ve been unlikely to raise an eyebrow. In 2023, you feel the need for active suspension of disbelief about the grim potential for abuses of power in relationships between students and teachers, teenagers and adults. We’re also told the only openly gay character, the chipper Posner (an excellent Immanuel Smith) goes on to live a life of pitiable hermetic isolation, which feels both jarring and unnecessarily cruel.

This, along with the last-minute death of a major character, form my main frustrations with the story. I suppose my complaint lies in the final twenty minutes of its two-hour twenty-minute runtime. It’s as though Bennett, worried that his sweeping state-of-the-nation play lacked poignancy, needed to throw in a tragedy for no reason at all. He didn’t. It was plenty poignant and moving enough as it was.

However, huge commendations go to the cast and crew of this production for making it compelling enough to hold my attention for over two hours. For one thing, the acting is competent across the board. Granted, the very clever dialogue served as the wind in their sails, but the sense of easy camaraderie the cast of boys manage to convey is endlessly entertaining. And the musical renditions of James Morrell as Scripps and Immanuel Smith’s Posner are fantastic. A particular shout out as well to Juliette Imbert as Mrs Lintot, the sole female character, who made me completely believe she was a no-nonsense middle-aged history teacher, and her timing was impeccable. Props too to Tom Pavey, who showed scene-stealing comedic timing as Lockwood.

The blocking, costuming and lighting are all polished yet unobtrusive allowing the dialogue and characters to shine. As far as adaptations go, director Niamh Jones and Producer Leah O’Grady stay faithful and genuine to the work and have given us a thought-provoking, funny and captivating night at the theatre.