The History Boys – A Memorable Lesson Taught at Dramaworks

At first I thought this was a rendition of “Everything You Wanted to Know about the UK Educational System, but Were Afraid to Ask.”  Although knowledge of terms such as Oxbridge, Supply Teacher, A-levels, Sixth-Formers are helpful, the themes in this play transcend time and place.  This is about how boys become men, how teachers affect our lives forever, about the randomness of history and the importance of art.

These weighty themes are examined along with an entertaining pastiche of comedy and popular songs, adding to the play’s representation of English school life as it was in the 1980’s (although heavily reliant on the playwright’s personal experiences in the 1950s).  There is just so much substance in the play I feel like I’m using a toy shovel to mine its depths in this review.

(Back) Nathan Stark, Jelani Alladin, Kyle Branzel,

(Front) Mike Magliocca, Matthew Minor, Colin Asercion,

 Colin McPhillamy, Kristian Bikic, John Evans Reese 

Photo by Samantha Mighdoll

From personal experience I can count the teachers who really mattered in my life on one hand and in particular two, one from high school and the other from college, men who urged me on and to whom I owe my life as it is.  Remarkably, to this day I am still in touch with both of them.   These are the kind of teachers celebrated in Alan Bennett’s erudite The History Boys.

Ironically, my college teacher taught the British Literature class which, little did I know, would come in “handy” for seeing this play.  There are so many references to British poets here, W.H. Auden, Rupert Brooke, Thomas Hardy (albeit primarily a novelist, his poem “Drummer Hodge” is quoted as part of a lesson) , A.E. Housman, Philip Larkin, Wilfred Owen, and Siegfried Sassoon, to name but a few.  Many of those poets wrote about the young men of WW I, the loss of innocence of an entire generation, which is still another theme of The History Boys.

Rob Donohoe Cliff Burgess  Photo by Samantha Mighdoll

The plot is fairly straightforward.  The headmaster of a boys' school in Northern England hires a “supply-teacher” (temporary teacher), Irwin, who is “results oriented” to help more students get high grades in the “A-level” exams and into the sacred “Oxbridge” circle, either Oxford University or Cambridge University.  He joins the two other teachers of the school’s “sixth-formers,” the exuberant, impassioned, and somewhat theatrical Hector, who has sort of an avuncular relationship with his students, and Mrs. Lintott who employs more conventional teaching methods.

Unlike Mrs. Lintott and Hector, Irwin’s focus is twofold:  helping the students get high exam marks and teaching them how to comport themselves in oral exams and interviews – the polish needed to excel in Oxbridge. If you can’t get in the front door of an historical inquiry, use the back door.  The “truth” is sometimes less relevant than how it is told.  At times this puts him in direct conflict with Hector, who at one point says “I count examinations, even for Oxford and Cambridge, as the enemy of education. Which is not to say that I don’t regard education as the enemy of education, too.”

Early in the play Bennett stages a scene entirely in French, taught by Hector, and in spite of the play being put on in front of an English speaking audience, one can glean the essence of what Hector is trying to do using this idiosyncratic method:  teaching the students about the subjective in French grammar using an elaborate conversation about how one behaves (or “should” behave) in a brothel.  He even involves the headmaster at the conclusion of the scene – passing it off at that point as a hospital scene (hilarious!) -- as the headmaster is trying to introduce Irwin.   It turns out that this lesson has a larger meaning in the play: the subjective in history or what might have been.

The headmaster clearly backs Irwin; especially after Hector is caught “fiddling” with one of the boys while they are riding on Hector’s motorcycle.  This is accidentally witnessed, and as the play makes clear, not unlike many events in history. The headmaster says to Mrs. Lintott: “Shall I tell you what is wrong with Hector as a teacher?  It isn’t that he doesn’t produce results.  He does.  But they are unpredictable and unquantifiable and in the current educational climate that is no use.  He may well be doing his job, but there is no method that I know of that enables me to assess the job that he is doing.  There is inspiration, certainly, but how do I quantify that?  And he has no notion of boundaries….So the upshot is I am glad he handled his pupils’ balls because that at least I can categorize.” 

At one point Bennett has some fun at the expense of acting, further emphasizing the chasm between Hector and Irwin. Irwin suggests that a student should downplay his interest in the theatre:  “Then soft pedal it, the acting side of it anyway.  Dons…most dons anyway…think the theatre is a waste of time.  In their view any undergraduate keen on acting forfeits all hope of a good degree.” Hector replies: “So much for Shakespeare.”

Angie Radosh  Mike Magliocca

Photo by Samantha Mighdoll

Mrs. Lintott has her special moment in the play too, a sudden feminist outburst that leaves the boys, Hector and Irwin momentarily silent: “I’ll tell you why there are no women historians on TV, it’s because they don’t get carried away for a start, and they don’t come bouncing up to you with every new historical notion they’ve come up with…the bow-wow school of history.  History’s not such frolic for women as it is for men.  Why should it be?   They never get round the conference table. In 1919, for instance, they just arranged the flowers then gracefully retired.  History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history?  History is women following behind with the bucket.”  Mind you, this play is set in the era of Margret Thatcher.

The “boys” are equally diverse and interesting, some turning out as we might imagine, and others a surprise.  A follow up of them later in life concludes the play, with some touching moments.

Cliff Burgess 

Nathan Stark

Fittingly, the teachers in the play are all PBD alumni, consummate professionals in every way.  If I were casting this play these are the very actors I’d seek for such pivotal roles. Colin McPhillamy plays Hector with flair, making his eccentricities more heartfelt than bizarre.  One feels compassion for his unusual teaching methods and his relationship with “the boys.”  Cliff Burgess is all business as Irwin who inveigles himself into a “co-teaching” role with Hector, or the “yin and yang” as one student describes the experience.  And yet Burgess makes sure the audience has empathy for him as well, especially in his edgy “approach-avoidance” relationship with Dakin, one of the students.  Angie Radosh plays Mrs. Lintott with the wisdom befitting a teacher who has taught at the same school for a long time.  Rob Donohoe is the headmaster, performing a humorous counterpoint, easily frustrated and bewildered by anything Hector does. But he rises to dramatic moments too. Outstanding performances by all.

The students are all new to PBD, played by Jelani Alladin, Colin Asercion, Kristian Bikic, Kyle Branzel, Mike Magliocca, Matthew Minor, John Evans Reese, and Nathan Stark. All the “boys” are terrific actors and although there are eight of them on stage, each one’s personality shines through.  It was a casting coup to find such a talented group on the regional theatre level.  Special callouts to Nathan Stark’s rendering of Dakin, whose brimming testosterone level and talk of the sexual conquest of the headmaster’s secretary lands him in the inner circle of the boys, envied.  Loss of sexual innocence is yet another theme in the play.  Contrast that to the sensitive portrayal by John Evans Reese as Posner, a boy who feels he is an outsider, desperately trying to connect, in spite of his being gay, Jewish, wanting Dakin to return his love.  And kudos to Kyle Branzel who doubles as the musician, playing a number of popular pieces on the piano for sing-alongs, and to accompany Posner who is able to express himself in songs, including a touching rendition of Rodgers & Hart’s classic Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered

Once again, special accolades go to the Director, J. Barry Lewis.  How does one put so many people on stage and in constantly changing scenes, the classroom, the hallway/locker room, the headmaster’s office, the coffee room, without breaking stride and dramatic momentum?  Lewis moves his characters at a pace which keeps the audience fully involved for its nearly three hours running time, including intermission.

Scenic design by Victor Becker and lighting design by Paul Black work together as those four scenes are revisited multiple times so in all there are more than 30 changes, the actors, mostly the students, moving the designs while lighting focuses on a character on a side of the stage so action is not broken.  Once the scenery is in place, full lighting snaps on.  Aside from the tunes of bygone years sung by the boys, and recordings of Edith Piaf, contemporary 80’s music accompanies the scenery changes, thanks to the sound design by Tyler Kieffer. Costume design by Erin Amico cleverly captured that 80s feeling.

Alan Bennett’s The History Boys is a rollicking intellectual feast, celebrating life-long learning and exploring the importance of art and the nature of history: is it merely a random series of events (or as one student espouses, “It’s just one fucking thing after another”) or events that we impose meaning on after the fact, finding patterns where there are really none? The play’s cadence of language, the quips, the acting out of famous movie scenes by the boys, the songs, and its stream of literary and popular cultural references make this a living, breathing experience.  The staging of this play is a very ambitious and successful achievement by PBD – theater to indeed think about. It gets an “A+” from me.

This Funny World

Before Rodgers and Hammerstein there was Rodgers and Hart.  They wrote so many great standards such as Manhattan, My Funny Valentine, The Lady Is a Tramp, I Could Write a Book, Bewitched, to name just a few of my favorites, but sometimes their songs became conflated with the other great standards of the era, those by George Gershwin and Cole Porter in particular.  Yet Rodgers and Hart were trailblazers in their own right.

They met as young students at Columbia University and they seemed destined for one another.  Rodgers of course could write a melody as us mere mortals can compose post cards. Noël Coward once said that Rodgers just “pissed melody.” He was the consummate composer and partner, productive and businesslike. One could always count on Richard Rodgers.  Larry Hart on the other hand was a troubled person. Unlike the “beautiful” people he wrote about and consorted with – first on Broadway and then in Hollywood -- he felt himself to be an outsider, he was gay, Jewish, and diminutive (always photographed standing while Rodgers was sitting at the piano).

His lyrics could be dark and cynical. But I’ve been so accustomed to playing their well known pieces, and as I do not have a singing voice, Hart’s lyrics became submerged in the deep pool of their music.  Furthermore, I've played most of their music from fake books, the melody line or verse only without the introductions.  Their songs without the intros are like birds without feet, homes without foundations.  I have a Gershwin songbook with the intros and I needed one for Rodgers and Hart. To the rescue:  Rodgers and Heart; A Musical Anthology.

Alas, my songbook arrived but I should have known that in this profit driven world the publisher (Hal Leonard) would chose the less expensive “perfect bound” alternative to spiral binding (such as my 40 year old collection of Gershwin’s songs).  Very sensible for the publisher but a nightmare for the pianist as most songs with the intros are at least 4 pages and turning the pages of a perfect bound book is difficult while performing. Even if one is merely playing for oneself it is frustrating to have to introduce a few bars of silence while trying to turn and pin back a page.

One could try to break the binding but ultimately pages would separate or one could guillotine the book and put the pages in plastic sleeves in a three ring binder, expensive and time consuming.

Ah, for the want of a nail. I knew there would ultimately be an iPad in my life and this was the final straw to tip the scale.  I'd photograph select songs with the iPad (still difficult to hold down certain sections of the book for photographing and having to accept some partially distorted pages, albeit legible). Then do the same for my Gershwin songs and other beloved standards, put them in albums, and then play the music from my iPad, merely swiping pages to “turn” them.  Voila it works! A couple of negatives though.  If your finger resides too long on the page you are swiping, you are returned to the pervious menu of all pages, so I’ve “perfected” the technique of quickly swiping while playing.  Furthermore, the page is about half the size of the printed book.  Good reading glasses to the rescue for that drawback.

 

This commitment to the iPad for my sheet music repertoire in turn has led to a certain acceptance about my piano technique.  I've gone into jazz, contemporary, some classical even, but I find the most satisfaction from the standards, particularly the music of the thirties and forties.  I was born too late to live in that moment, but today I find the themes to be as relevant to today as when they were written. So I’m making my iPad music albums all standards focused when playing in public venues, mostly local retirement homes. To date I’ve performed at The Inn at LaPosada, the Hanley Center, The Waterford, Mangrove Bay and most recently a monthly “gig” at Brookdale Senior Living.

And now I can incorporate the introductions to many of the standards which so beautifully set up the songs, sometimes acting as a counterpoint and foreshadowing the content.  Finally, playing the Rodgers and Hart Songbook yielded a double bonus, finding songs that are absent from my fake books, such as their hilarious To Keep my Love Alive, and some songs I’ve rarely heard.  One such song is This Funny World.  Here is where you see the genius of Larry Hart: the lyrics are so achingly cynical -- one can imagine Hart wearing his own heart on his sleeve. 

Richard Rodgers’ magnificent melody populates the introduction with minor chords, underpinning the dark lyrics by Hart. (Although, when working with Hart, Rodgers would normally first write the melody.  When collaborating with Hammerstein, the lyrics would normally precede Rodgers’ composition.) Rodgers writes the song in a major key.  Such sad lyrics to such a beautiful melody and the chorus which is also the title of the song is repeated four times just to make sure you don’t forget it!

With my imperfect equipment, in my imperfect recording studio (our living room), I recorded the piece and posted it on YouTube so it plays on all devices.  It helps to read the words before or during the video.

A mop! A broom! A pail!

The stuff my dreams are made of!

You hope, you strive, you fail!

The world's a place you're not afraid of.

But soon you are brought down to earth,

And you learn what your dream was worth.

This funny world makes fun

of the things that you strive for

This funny world can laugh

at the dreams you're alive for.

If you are beaten conceal it!

There's no pity for you.

For the world cannot feel it.

Just keep to yourself

Weep to yourself.

This funny world can turn right around

and forget you.

It's always sure to roll right along

when you're through.

If you are broke you shouldn't mind.

It's all a joke for you will find

This funny world is making fun of you.

Light Years

Can it be?  Eight years writing this blog.  That’s the amount of time I spent in grammar school. Those eight years in PS 90 seem to be light years in the distant past, but at the time they were an eternity.  And four years in high school were equally drawn out, anticipating adulthood, the point at which I could leave the turmoil of my parent’s home.  Time accelerated in college, came on full speed during my career and raising a family, and now it’s a year in a blink.

I think I’ve been true to my “mission statement” in this space -- essentially an eclectic, kaleidoscopic diary. There have been 480 entries thus far, enough to fill at least five printed volumes.  Content has morphed into more about theatre, literature and still some politics and economics, but less about family history.  I’ve pretty much covered that, and the older I get the more I’d like to move on. 

Nonetheless, I still write about things which are fairly personal, always hesitating about what I “put out there.”  As this blog has evolved, so has the digital world, data mining for all sorts of nefarious reasons.  And the digital world has moved way beyond blogs to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumbler, social networks where a momentary impulse can be just thrown out as a developed thought.  Not here.   Traffic building has not been my intent.  According to Google, in eight years there have been 86,021 page views. Some web sites do that in a minute. Most land here via searches (not for me, but topics I write about) and frequently those are image searches as I’ve incorporated countless photographs in this space

The most viewed entry is one in February 2011 about the Maiden Voyage of Oceania’s ship ‘Marina.’ Not far behind in fifth place is the one I wrote on my open heart surgery, only two months later 

Without going into details of the latter, it is truly a twist of fate that I made it through that voyage without ending up in the freezer with the flowers (a favorite repository for those who die on cruises).  Of course I didn’t realize that I was so vulnerable at the time (although we’re all vulnerable all the time). I suppose that is another reason I write this blog:  it is a record and it allows me to reflect on my life and matters of living, to have a documented trail.  I go to it when memory fails.

This is a natural segue into a book I recently read, Light Years by James Slater. We’re talking about elegant masterpiece writing here -- an author I should have read long ago, known as a “writer’s writer” by many, a prose stylist.  Perhaps I failed to come to his writing as his earlier work was based on his years as a fighter pilot in the Korean War.  His novel The Hunters was made into a movie starring one of my favorite film noir actors, Robert Mitchum.  Little did I know when I saw the film, it was based on James Salter’s novel of the same title. It is so incongruous that the same person wrote both novels.

Salter died only recently, having just turned 90, in Sag Harbor, where I spent part of the summers of my childhood.  The New Yorker published an elegant eulogistic essay on his passing.

 

So I am very late to discovering Salter, although his Light Years is closely related to other authors I have admired, ones who have written  about marital implosion (the subject of Salter’s great work), Updike, Cheever, Yates, Ford, to name but a few.

Lapidary, ethereal, poetic prose fills the pages of Light Years.  The plot almost exists out of time and place – although it’s set in the 70s, mostly in the northern suburbs of New York.  The dissolution of a marriage is presented as a case of everyday entropy, but in stunning language and descriptions.  Think Hemingway’s short, rhythmic sentences and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s lyricism. .  It’s unlike anything else I’ve read.

It is the story of Viri Berland, a moderately successful architect, and Nedra his beautiful free-spirited wife.  Mind you, this was written in the nascent days of feminism.  Much of the novel is viewed from Nedra’s viewpoint.  They live in the Hudson Valley, with their children.  Days pass, light into darkness, darkness becomes new days, years.  Light years.  (The light imagery is omnipresent.) They have a social life, parties, each have dalliances, quiet ones, not the kind which lead to nasty marital confrontations. Time passes until they find they are empty nesters and now what? 

Nedra is the one who makes the break but it is Viri, confounded by the change in his life who moves on to another marriage, one he regrets.  To indulge in more detail about the plot, though, is senseless as it is the feeling that one derives from reading Light Years which is the point.  We’re all just brief flickers of light in the annals of time, eternity of nothingness before we are born and a similar eternity when we are gone.  We believe in endless tomorrows while living out our younger years, the sum of countless moments, most not remembered later, but near the end, the hour-glass so one sided, we look back and wonder where it all went.

Salter tells his story in lush language.  Of  those parties in their early years of marriage: “Country dinners, the table dense with glasses, flowers, all the food one can eat, dinners ending in tobacco smoke, a feeling of ease.  Leisurely dinners.  The conversation never lapses. Their life is special, devout, they prefer to spend time with their children, they have only a few friends.”

Or, when Nedra goes to the city to shop:  “Life is weather, Life is meals.  Lunches on a blue checked cloth on which salt has spilled.  The smell of tobacco.  Brie, yellow apples, wood-handled knives.  It is trips to the city, daily trips.  She is like a farm woman who goes to the market.  She drove to the city for everything, its streets excited her, winter streets leaking smoke. She drove along Broadway.  The sidewalks were white with stains.  There were only certain places where she bought food; she was loyal to them, demanding.  She parked her car wherever it was convenient, in bus stops, prohibited zones; the urgency of her errands protected her.”

In his prime, Viri thinks about his career as an architect:  “I must make one building, even if it’s small, that everyone will notice.  Then a bigger one.  I must ascend by steps….He wanted one thing, the possibility of one thing: to be famous.  He wanted to be central to the human family, what else is there to long for, to hope?  Already he walked modestly along the streets, as if certain of what was coming.  He had nothing.  He had only the carefully laid out luggage of bourgeois life, his scalp beginning to show beneath the hair, his immaculate hands.  And the knowledge; yes, he had knowledge….But knowledge does not protect one.  Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside.  Passion, energy, likes: these are what life admires.  Still, anything can be endured if all humanity is watching.  The martyrs prove it.  We live in the attention of others.  We turn to it as flower to the sun….There is no complete life.  There are only fragments.  We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands.  And yet, this pouring, this flood of encounters, struggles, dreams …one must be unthinking, like a tortoise.  One must be resolute, blind.  For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing the opposite.  Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox.  So that life is a matter of choices, each on final and of little consequence, like dropping stones into the sea.”

Viri’s and Nedra’s time with their children is precious:  “Children are our crop, our fields, our earth.  They are the birds let loose into darkness.  They are errors renewed.  Still, they are the only source from which may be drawn a life more successful, more knowing than our own.  Somehow they will do one thing, take one step further, they will see the summit.  We believe in it, the radiance that streams from the future, from days we will not see.  Children must live, must triumph.  Children must die; that is an idea we cannot accept….There is no happiness like this happiness: quiet mornings, light from the river, the weekend ahead.  They lived a Russian life, a rich life, interwoven, in which the misfortune of one, a failure, illness, would stagger them all.  It was like a garment, this life.  Its beauty was outside, its warmth within.”

After one of their parties, later in their marriage, Salter writes:  “Nights of marriage, conjugal nights, the house still at last, the cushions indented where people had sat, the ashes warm.  Nights that ended at two o’clock, the snow falling, the last guest gone.  The dinner plates were left unwashed, the bed icy cold…They lay in the dark like two victims.  They had nothing to give to one another, they were bound by a pure, inexplicable love….He was asleep, she could tell without looking.  He slept like a child, soundlessly, deep.  His thinning hair was disheveled; his hand lay extended and soft.  If they had been another couple she would have been attracted to them; she would have loved them, even – they were so miserable.”

When Nedra begins to hint at leaving, Viri is stunned, especially now that he was approaching late middle age:  “He was reaching that age, he was at the edge of it, when the world becomes suddenly more beautiful, when it reveals itself in a special way, in every detail, roof and wall, in the leaves of trees fluttering faintly before a rain.  The world was opening itself, as if to allow, now that life was shortening, one long, passionate look, and all that had been withheld would finally be given.”

And when she is gone, he is left in the house: “Dead flies on the sills of sunny windows, weeds along the pathway, the kitchen empty.  The house was melancholy, deceiving; it was like a cathedral where, amid the serenity, something is false, the saints are made of florist’s wax, the organ has been gutted.  Viri did not have the spirit to do anything about it.  He lived in it helplessly as we live in our bodies when we are older.”

“...alone in this city, alone on this sea. The days were strewn about him, he was a drunkard of days. He had achieved nothing. He had his life--it was not worth much--not like a life that, though ended, had truly been something. If I had had courage, he thought, if I had had faith. We preserve ourselves as if that were important, and always at the expense of others. We hoard ourselves. We succeed if they fail, we are wise if they are foolish, and we go onward, clutching, until there is no one--we are left with no companion save God. In whom we do not believe. Who we know does not exist.”

As one might imagine from the last quote alone, the novel comes to a profoundly sad ending, disturbing in so many ways.  And I’ll let it go at that.