The History Boys

By Alan Bennett. Directed by Dean Paul Gibson. An Arts Club Theatre Company production. At the Granville Island Stage on Wednesday, October 1. Continues until October 25

Sex is slippery, but so are history and education.

In Alan Bennett’s 2004 play The History Boys, the smartest contemporary script Vancouver has seen in a long time, two teachers compete for the loyalties of eight Sheffield grammar school boys who are preparing for their entrance exams to Oxford and Cambridge. Sixtyish Hector’s wild lessons include group enactments of everything from King Lear to the ’40s film Now, Voyager, and an improvised scene—in French—about a young man visiting a brothel. Hector believes that our relationships to history and art are passionate and deeply personal—even private.

The headmaster notes that the success of Hector’s methods is impossible to quantify. Like our provincial Liberal government, he wants measurable results, so he hires the young Irwin to supplement Hector’s instruction—offhandedly advising him to grow a mustache to improve classroom control.

Irwin teaches the boys to get the examiners’ attention through cleverness. His approach is to take an accepted idea, invert it, and then go looking for proofs. Irwin encourages his pupils to contend that Stalin was a nice guy, for instance, and that the Japanese were surprised by Pearl Harbor.

Although many read the play as an endorsement of Hector’s methods, playwright Bennett has said he doesn’t favour one approach over the other. And the teachers are vulnerable in similar ways. Neither truly reveals his heart; Irwin maintains an ironic distance, and Hector uses art as compensation, as a bulwark against sorrow. Both men lust after their pupils, which is where the real randomness of human events starts to unfold.

Director Dean Paul Gibson’s interpretation capitalizes on the driving energy of youth. In Brian Linds’s sound design, shards of ’80s pop tunes blast away during the scene changes, while the kinetic, historical imagery of Jamie Nesbitt’s black-and-white projections increases the sense of excitement and disorientation.

Ted Roberts’s set, which folds and unfolds into various configurations, increases the sense of instability. Sometimes, when tragedy begins to reveal itself (including at the end of Act 1), this level of energy feels too showy, but mostly it works.

We rarely get to see Bernard Cuffling (Hector) assail such emotionally complex material, and that’s a shame, because he does an excellent job with it here. There’s some fantastic work from the actors playing the boys, too. Gord Myren is having the time of his life as a wag named Timms. In the relatively small role of the rugger-playing Rudge, Kyle Cameron is absolutely spot-on. His accent is firmly Canadian, but Daniel Karasik is still quietly spellbinding as Posner, who is in love with the charismatic Dakin.

Charlie Carrick, who plays that part, is every bit as drop-dead gorgeous as the script requires, and he nails Dakin’s cockiness. As the run progresses, he’ll probably relax and have even more fun. Kirk Smith, who has done very little large-scale professional work to date, does fine in the enormous role of Irwin, but he needs to light more of a sexual fire for the play’s dynamics to work to their full potential.

The Arts Club’s production of The History Boys is the first must-see production of the fall theatre season.