Making the grade

Alan Bennett has not lost his talent to amuse or ability to disturb sleeping clichés with the nudge and poke of his bright mind. The History Boys, which is obsessed by the subject and nature of education, proves that much.

Yet Bennett's comic ramble through the late teenage lives of eight northern grammar school boys trying to win scholarships or places at Oxbridge in the Eighties strikes me with all the force of an anti-climax.

For this is not so much a play as the demonstration and endless repetition of an idea, with Richard Griffiths's eccentric anarch of a form-master, Frances de La Tour's scintillating, scathing, feminist history mistress and Clive Merrison's authoritarian headmaster helping to provide delightful comic relief.

A programme essay reveals all: Bennett looks back in longing to mythical good old days when the point of education was the romantic pursuit of knowledge and enlightenment.

You learned for the joy of it. Perish the thought of examinations, which Bennett believes can be passed if you learn the right tricks to rouse the examiners.

This big theory, inspired by Bennett's own progress from grammar school to Oxbridge scholarship, cries out to be dramatised in the author's own Fifties. Unwisely, though, The History Boys is set some 30 years on, not that you could tell this from the way the oldfashioned boys talk and behave.

They sound rather Fifties, save for a bit of gay banter which would have been outlawed then. Indeed the interludes with the boys beautifully parodying Brief Encounter and The Seventh Veil, singing Bye Bye Black Bird, alluding to Gracie Fields and George Formby, make it clear they are Bennett's contemporaries.

Only Bob Crowley's schoolroom settings and film back projections give an idea we are close to modern times. You would never know, however, that this is the educationally thrusting age of Thatcher. Her name is not even mentioned.

The school environment and its characters offer high amusement in Nicholas Hytner'sdashing production. Bright boys, expertly led by Dominic Cooper's juvenile homme fatale Dakin, and his smitten admirer, Samuel Barnett's sharp, gay Jewish Posner, strut their stuff.

Richard Griffiths's appealing general studies schoolmaster, Hector, who treats schooltime as fun and fills his boys' minds with lashings of poetry, drama, and philosophical aphorisms, stands as Bennett's ideal educator.