The week in theatre: The History Boys; A Chorus Line – review

The premiere of The History Boys in 2004 was an incendiary affair . Curtain up was delayed by a fire in the lighting rig. Alan Bennett’s drama, though more rueful than raging, delivered a fiery blast against an education system that promoted smartness over truth; history as a parade of mighty men; Oxbridge snobberies. Nicholas Hytner’s National Theatre production blazed a trail for new young actors: among them Dominic Cooper, James Corden and Russell Tovey.

I had remembered the drama as swirling around the provoking, enticing figure of Hector, played with crumbling charisma by the late Richard Griffiths . He is the English teacher who, believing that exams are “the enemy of education… Which is not to say that I don’t regard education as the enemy of education too”, sets himself against a results-obsessed headmaster and a canny new controversialist teacher. He fills his pupils’ heads with literature that will flavour the experiences they go on to have. He also fiddles with the boys who ride pillion on his motorbike. I never felt, as some have, that Bennett was excusing the groping – it is, literally, a fatal flaw – though in a confrontation that I don’t remember from 20 years ago, a hypocrisy is neatly exposed: the headmaster who excoriates Hector thinks it perfectly OK to feel up his female secretary.

Here is a play that sticks up for non-bankable knowledge, for thought rather than opinion, candour above cleverness

The History Boys now seems to me less Hector-centred, far more multisided. For all that there is only one woman on stage (well that is part of the point), the play has a strong feminist thread. For all that it is tremendously funny, and on occasion farcical, it is written in admiration of the sense of settled loss that runs through English poetry from Hardy to AE Housman and Larkin. Here is a maze of might-have-beens and near misses, a play set in the subjunctive tense, that sticks up for non-bankable knowledge, for thought rather than opinion, candour above cleverness. Crassness is skewered when the head talks of the boys becoming “shareholders in the wonderful world of words”.

If anything, there is even more need for nuance – in and out of the theatre – today than there was in 2004. Yet though the qualities of Bennett’s play glimmer through Seán Linnen’s production , they don’t grip. Everyone is slightly too much in command of who they are. Simon Rouse is nicely fragile as Hector but he looks doomed from the beginning; as the heroine history teacher, Gillian Bevan is convincingly sharp but her epithets sometimes seem already prepared. Grace Smart’s design, which sets the action in front of what looks like a static caravan, is puzzling.

Still, the dialogue is as fresh as ever. So is the new talent. Archie Christoph-Allen makes a terrific stage debut as the cocky (yes) class idol, Dakin, tempering his lolling assurance with a hint of uncertainty. Lewis Cornay tugs at the heart as Posner, the lovestruck boy who sings, sweetly and raptly, Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered like an urchin who has landed in a cabaret. I saw this at preview: it has time to settle as it sets off on tour. And it might. Let’s give the subjunctive a chance.

In 1975, the dancer, choreographer and director Michael Bennett sent a blast across the bows of musical theatre. A Chorus Line swapped glitz for grit. Sequins for leg-warmers. Romance for struggle. It drew on real-life anecdotes. Which raised the question of whether Bennett was sole creator. The show was based on interviews Bennett had recorded with Broadway dancers. The interviewees originally waived the right to their stories for $1 apiece, but were later given a share of the royalties. Just as well. For years – until Cats pounced on the record – this was the longest-running show on Broadway.

That no longer looks surprising. A Chorus Line, in which a host of tiny biographies are danced and sung in less than two hours, puts its fingers on several pulses. It offers greasepaint glamour and backstage frenzy. It neatly musicalises the urge to stand out, the urge to fit in, the clenched-teeth hard work; the compulsion to confess.

First seen at Leicester’s Curve three years ago, where my colleague Clare Brennan admired it , Nikolai Foster’s production zips along on the tramlines of the Bennett’s ingenious idea of using the audition process to unpack performers’ lives while presenting their talents. The audience become judges, like the onstage director. Jubilation and disappointment are magnified by compression: everyone’s future hangs on momentary display as surely as that of an Olympic competitor. The most traditionally plotted part of the evening – involving the show’s director, played with unexpected blankness by Adam Cooper, and an ex-girlfriend – is the most tepid. Yet little has dated: not least the character who, discovering she was scoring 10 for her dancing and three for her looks, got herself plastically rearranged.

Like The History Boys , this is a show that generates talent. Such as that of Redmand Rance as the boy who kicks off the solo turns, remembering a childhood of dancing in his sister’s borrowed shoes. Finely choreographed by Ellen Kane, Rance makes each turn and stretch and bend look utterly easy, involuntary. As if he were gum being chewed by the stage.

Star ratings (out of five)
The History Boys ★★★
A Chorus Line ★★★★

• The History Boys tours until 2 November

• A Chorus Line tours until 5 October