"The History Boys' at the Arden (1st review)

What kind of talent is coming out of Philadelphia's college performing arts programs? For the answer, peek in on the Arden's classroom set for Alan Bennett's The History Boys. A play that calls for eight late-teenagers would be hard to cast well locally without recent Temple alums like Ankit Dogra and Evan Jonigkeit, UArts graduate Brian Cowden, and the particularly brilliant work of current UArts senior Michael Doherty.

These four young men contribute to an exceptional ensemble. But beyond their skillful acting, the Arden stages a drama whose sharp intellectual debates cut to the core of if, how and why a society should value art, culture, education and learning.

Hiring a ringer

Bennett's play opens on eight seventh-term students at a British boarding school in the early 1980s. All earned high exam scores, potentially qualifying them for entrance to Oxford or Cambridge. The headmaster (David Howey) understandably wants to feather the school's reputation with their success and hires a ringer (Irwin played by Matthew Amendt) to prep them for the universities' rigorous entrance exams.

Irwin's hiring rankles and collides with the educational goals of the two history teachers, Mrs. Lintott (Maureen Torsney-Weir) and Hector (Frank X)— who've been responsible for the boys' success so far. In her classes, Lintott teaches facts and a search for objective truth; Hector educates through an anarchy of cultural immersion, where the boys discover the richness of culture through skits about a French brothel, Edith Piaf songs, and the use of verse as a kind of elevated banter.

Irwin, by contrast, teaches them to cast off the shackles of truth and nuance in order to exploit even trivial knowledge for quantifiable ends. His goal: Get them into Oxbridge so they can get on in life.

Between sex and friendship

Under Terry Nolen's finessed direction, Bennett's three-hour cram session speeds along with the quick, explosive pace of an '80s rock anthem, and Nolen wisely divides the energy of the eight boys between the battleground of debate and the minefield of adolescent sex, rivalry and friendship. The production fuses passion with rigor, heartache with cool detachment, and the fun of being a kid with the anticipation of the burden soon to fall on young shoulders.

Led by the rich, nuanced interpretations of Doherty and Jonigkeit, the eight students flavor their schoolyard rivalries with the familiar— but never stereotyped— kid roles (jock, sensitive one, budding lothario) that populate high schools in every nation. As Irwin, Amendt ignites every scene with the short fuse of his quick wit and delivers his sophisticated social commentary— our veneration of celebrity over saints, lost relics over the sacrifices that made them possible— with a charm that easily seduces the allegiances of the students and audience alike.

Two-dimensional villain

Bennett constructs a two-dimensional "villain" out of the headmaster (much like the prep-school father in the film Dead Poets Society) , who seeks expediency and quantifiable results over the development of well-rounded human beings. Bennett also muddies his otherwise tidy script with intimations of pederasty. Unlike the integration of man-boy love with intellectual pursuits in Stoppard's The Invention of Love, here it feels tacked on merely to manufacture additional conflict. Frank X as the lecherous teacher Hector does a surprisingly effective job of eliciting sympathy from the audience while keeping the play focused on the battle of ideas rather than sex. If nothing else, The History Boys puts to rest the notion of the "selfless teacher" who seeks only his students' best interests.

Hector uses an A.E. Houseman quote to argue, "All knowledge is precious, whether or not it serves the slightest human use." The pragmatic Irwin, by contrast, instructs the boys in "how to get on in life." Between them they illustrate Bennett's apparent point: that education really concerns what kind of world its teachers want to build.♦


To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.