Teachers pet... Tony award winners Richard
Griffiths and Frances de la Tour with Stephen
Campbell Moore in The History Boys.
Photograph: Tristram Kenton
England's soccer may be pedestrian, its cricket injury-prone and its rugby fallible, but at least its theatre retains championship status. The news that Alan Bennett's The History Boys has won six of Broadway's Tony awards - for best play, actor, featured actress, director, set and lighting - is cause for celebration. I don't imagine there'll be an open-top bus parade through the streets of London but down at the National Theatre they'll be cracking open the champagne.
What makes Bennett's triumph all the more piquant is that it is unexpected: I was one of many who had serious doubts as to whether The History Boys would survive on Broadway. My own fears were prompted by the fact that I kept meeting American theatre parties in London who sniped at Bennett's play. Why, all of them asked, doesn't he condemn "inappropriate relationships" between teachers and pupils? Why does he let Hector, who fondles boys as they ride pillion on his motorbike, off so lightly? Why does the play even end with an elegiac tribute to Hector?
I kept arguing, in response, that Bennett was not in the business of moral condemnation: his point was that teachers like Hector may be both inspirational and flawed at the same time; that you have to accept human beings for what they are.
But I could see that my pleas fell on stony ground: I was met with pursed lips, furrowed brows and warnings that in America the "abuse of power", by teachers and priests especially, was a big issue. I realise now that I was largely addressing visitors from the midwest: on the more liberal east coast, it seems, plays are not expected to be instruments of morality.
However, I had another reason for suspecting that The History Boys might be, at best, a "flop d'estime." Ever since Forty Years On, Bennett's abiding theme has been the nature of England: a country whose postwar history he views with nostalgic exasperation. Obviously Bennett's latest play is about many other subjects as well - the process of teaching; the power of words; history itself as a mixture of accident and design. But since it is deliberately set in the 1980s, I also deduced it was about the moment when everything in English life, including education, became driven by market values. How, I wondered, would that play on Broadway? What I'd perhaps forgotten was that Reaganomics was as powerful an instrument of social change as Thatcherism.
Anyway, I'm delighted to have been proved wrong; and I raise my glass to Bennett himself, Richard Griffths, Frances de la Tour, Nicholas Hytner, Bob Crowley and Mark Henderson for their awards. The play's triumph proves that great art can overcome the cultural divide.
Yet my mind flashes back to a moment when, in praising the play to a group of American students, I lightly remarked that there was always something erotic about the teacher-pupil relationship. I noticed the next week that one particular female student, who detested the play, rushed out of the seminar room on finding herself alone in my presence. Clearly she thought I was a hetero Hector rather than a hectoring hetero - which only goes to show that, for all the success of The History Boys, in America the teaching process is still shrouded in Oleanna-like angst.
