Dominic Cooper and Richard Griffiths as Hector in The Background Boys, a film of the play by Alan Bennett. Photograph: Allstar/BBC/Sportsphoto Ltd
There are obvious pitfalls in reading through also considerably into the news that Alan Bennett’s The Historical past Boys has just been voted the nation’s favourite perform. After all, Bennett’s 2004 perform had a extended run in London, toured extensively more than a lot of many years and has been created into a successful movie. So the straightforward fact is that a lot of individuals have witnessed and enjoyed it. This familiarity signifies The Background Boys was consequently in an ace position to win the contest organised by the English Touring Theatre.
Conversely, the limits of accessibility surely also describe why Bennett’s perform did not prime the poll in London and the south-east of England, in which the palm for favourite play went as an alternative to Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem. There’s no way that Jerusalem, with its life-improving celebration of anti-authoritarianism and the spirit of William Blake, would bomb outside London. On the contrary. It’s just that theatre-goers in the rest of Britain have had considerably much less possibility so far to see Butterworth’s great 2009 play than Londoners have.
Other geographical distinctions also counsel towards over-interpretation. It may possibly be tempting to suppose that Ulster’s latest background has anything to do with Hamlet, not the Bennett play, topping the poll in Northern Ireland. All people ghosts of the previous, those dead bodies, those unavenged murders, that instability at the heart of the state maybe it all adds up. But Hamlet is also the favourite in south-west England, the place ancestral internecine conflict and grievance is usually – however I may be incorrect – significantly less pronounced. So the straightforward explanation would seem to fall quick.
So what does describe the somewhat curious truth that a play about a group of northern state school sixth-kind boys getting ready for Oxbridge in the 1980s touches such a modern national chord? Availability of and access to performances is naturally critical. The sociology of theatregoers probably matters as well. The play’s wit, character and pace give it even more positive aspects – there’s no denying that we British like a laugh in our plays. Bennett’s much-loved status, as he approaches his 80th birthday following 12 months, undoubtedly assists as effectively.
But the deeper solution to the status of The History Boys also lies someplace in the synergy among two other issues. The 1st is hinted at by the truth that Bennett’s perform topped the poll in north-west England, north-east England, eastern England and the Midlands. Bennett writes about – and also for – the neglected half of Britain that is neither bathed in the glow of London’s pleasure and prosperity, nor culturally distinct enough to be governed by devolved institutions. In his quirky way Bennett is the playwright, rather as JB Priestley as soon as was, of the post-industrial England of which so many in the south are the two ignorant and disdainful.
The second issue, which overlaps the first in some ways, is that The Background Boys is not in the finish just a comedy about college and expanding up – even though of course it is the two these items also. It is also an angry lament for the passing of a state school training program of which Bennett himself is such a flowering.
In spite of what you might study in Personal Eye, there are a single or two of us Guardian columnists who are wholly state educated and proud to have sent our very own young children to state schools too. As somebody who not only went to a state grammar college in the north of England – like the one particular in The Background Boys – but also to the quite school in Leeds that Bennett (whose father was our nearby butcher when I was a boy) attended himself, there is absolutely nothing quaint or exotic to me about the world of his play. My school was like that.
In addition, like Bennett, I am a background boy. My generation falls halfway between Bennett’s very own and the a single he depicts in his play. Nevertheless, the college he describes in his introduction to The History Boys is in every way one particular that I recognise, with its excitements, its insecurities, its snobberies and its occasional quite real cruelties. I can by no means forget the extended-haired boy who was named into the headmaster’s examine and physically restrained whilst another instructor attempted to reduce off his hair. The boy broke free of charge, ran screaming from the college, and rightly never came back.
But I also recognise the pride and the civic benevolence. As Bennett says in that introduction, if you got into Oxbridge, as he did and I did, you got your photo in the regional paper and your schooling was paid for. Bennett’s wholly proper assertion that there was real civic pride in such achievements was brought house to me when, as an undergraduate, I applied for an further 12 months of grant from Leeds education department. Back came a letter, handwritten by the chief education officer, Mr Taylor, agreeing to the application on the grounds that he was assured I would proceed to deliver distinction upon Leeds in the years ahead. A letter like that seals a deal with a area for life, I can tell you.
We dwell in a different nation these days, of course. Excellent secondary and greater training and training for all – and not just for some, as in the 1960s – are high-priced. Great teachers never develop on trees and are not low-cost to train or retain. As Ofsted stated only this week, entry to the best educating is usually down to very good luck as considerably as to socioeconomic standing.
But this unfairness is not equally shared. Nearly 60 many years ago, the undergraduate Bennett was struck by the unfairness that memorable teachers – like the unforgettable Hector he placed in a state school in The Background Boys – appeared to be concentrated in the private colleges. That unfairness is nevertheless with us nowadays. The value Britain pays for the privileges bought by the few for their young children is nevertheless far too high – and we all know it.
The History Boys is “about” plenty of issues. A big component of it, though, is about the reality that the likelihood to thrill to, and benefit from, fantastic educating is neither a substantial sufficient public priority nor shared out relatively.
The essential line in the perform is the last one particular. Hector says basically: “Pass it on.” What is to be passed on is partly the enjoy of information, of suggestions, contemplating and speaking, of training. But there is also a far more indignant political message about passing on the unfinished organization of educational unfairness. You cannot search at Britain right now and not see how unfinished that function is. That is certainly part of the explanation of why Bennett’s perform connects so powerfully with so a lot of.
Why do private schools still attract the most memorable teachers? | Martin Kettle
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