A piece of the pre-history of the blog - wrote this in 2005 on a blogger account and was recently reminded that it existed with Blogger closing the account due to inactivity since 2007. So here's a bit of a blast from the past.
"The History Boys" is a play about a class of students in a small high school 80's England, applying to go to Oxford and Cambridge. The principal decides it'd be worth it to bring in a new History teacher to groom them appropriately for their Oxford and Cambridge interviews - to sell themselves better. And thus the conflict begins between the new teacher, Mr. Irwin, and Hector, the boy's general studies teacher, who believes in knowledge for its own sake...
Yeah, I know, sounds very dry, but it ends up being quite fascinating - well, to me, anyway. The boys are a deliberate mix - Posner, the anguished gay one who hasn't quite matured yet (gosh, how could I empathize with him, I wonder); Dakin, the self-confident one who's been conducting a campaign on the principal's secretary; Scripps, the religious one who's mostly religious to annoy his parents; and Rudge, the plain-speaking one who really prefers Rugger and Golf, and who describes history as "one fucking thing after another". And Irwin's "selling yourself" techniques are shown in an early flashforward to serve him all too well in his future career in Government ("take refuge in paradox - restriction is the price of freedom, that kind of thing").
The performances are uniformly excellent- the Sydney theatre company's selling it with a big picture of Richard Griffiths (who used to play the Chef in "Pie in the Sky" on the ABC, showed up as a brilliant professor and his evil duplicate in "Naked Gun 2 1/2", and is probably going to be back a few times as Mr. Dursley in the rest of the "Harry Potter" series), but the stars of the show are undoubtedly the boys, in all their variety. Well-recommended - if you can get a ticket...
(Incidentally, among the boys who were part of the touring company were Russell Tovey, Dominic Cooper, Samuel Barnett, Sacha Dawan and James Corden - also unmentioned in this is the fantastic Frances DeLa Tour).
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