Demob Happy

Boy school

4/10

Nicholas Hytner’s film version of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys makes little attempt to furnish the play with much cinematic technique and serves only the rather meagre purpose of bringing it to a wider audience. Having Hytner – himself a theatre director by trade – direct this screen version of the play shows in itself a general lack of ambition and vision for the adaptation. Using the cast of the recent popular production of the play and with only minimal exploitation of the spacial and atmospheric freedom afforded to cinema, it starts as flatly as an episode of Grange Hill, although the rythmn of the theatrical dialogue quickly starts to engage. The quality of the filmmaking itself is sub-soap opera, in particular the motorcycle crash that provides camp teacher Hector’s denouement. One minute they are on the bike, the screen goes white, a screeching of tyres is heard, and the next thing we see is a bike on the gravel with a spinning wheel. This is so laughably underwhelming it can only be viewed as a massive injustice to the play, for which this is surely a dramatic moment.

Your enjoyment of the film will therefore rest on your engagement with the themes of the play, albeit divested of the special tension between the audience and performers that defines the theatre experience and makes it distinct from other artforms. I am not going to explore the relative merits of the play itself but, personally, I find all the erudite witticisms leave me cold: the kind of witty, but not actually funny, references that have people in the theatre loudly guffawing to show everyone else that they Got The Joke. Indeed there was some such person when I watched this in the cinema. Mediocre in the extreme.