The History Boys was first performed at the National Theatre in 2004 and was immediatery successful; it forms part of an ongoing creative partnership between the playwright Alan Bennett and the director Nicholas Hytner. The play then toured the world, including Broadway, and many of the young lead actors have gone on to individual success in theatre, television and entertainment, including James Corden, Jamie Parker and Dominic Cooper.
The main focus of the play is the impact of two very different teachers on a group of eight young men at a grammar school who are preparing to sit entrance exams for Oxford and Cambridge. The first, Hector, idealises education. He sees it as his duty to educate the 'boys' for life with knowledge about everything from English poetry to the songs of Ella Fitzgerald. For him, exams are 'the enemy of education' (p.48). A second teacher, Iravin, is appointed by the pramatic head, and teaches the boys to develop attention-grabbing opinions which will help them stand out from the crowd in their exams.
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