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One of the many zinger lines in The History Boys is spoken by a young student named Rudge. Asked to define history, the athlete who hopes that he'll be admitted to Oxford for his rugby skills says, "History is just one fucking thing after another."

It's a statement that can't be proven wrong. It's also, as playwright Alan Bennett explains in the interview below, not his line, but one that he cribbed from an Oxford scholar. Who can say that history isn't the same series of "things" that Rudge identifies?

In The History Boys, which takes place at a "public" school where teachers who are the products of local universities prepare a brood of precocious history students for exams that will determine whether they enter Oxford or Cambridge, history is something else. It is a discipline that they learn directly, from the conventional classroom experience. It is also something that is learned obliquely, from the unconventional approach practiced by a fleshy aging closeted mentor to the boys, Hector, played magnificently by Richard Griffiths. And it is something that is threatening to eclipse Hector's education-for-education's-sake ethos. It is the point of departure for performances - novel twists on accepted interpretations and truth - which will ensure that the boys will be accepted into Oxford or Cambridge, and hence enter history at a competitive advantage.

The play was a huge hit in London, and then in New York, which probably explains why it was adapted for the screen in anticipation of expanding that audience. (Bear in mind that Alan Bennett is among the most filmable of writers for the stage.) Bennett's script, not so different from his play (and available from Faber & Faber), is part coming of age story, part reckoning among the aging teachers who taught the boys that "life is what happens to other people." With a solid cast that has too many participants to name here, it's no surprise that The History Boys caught on as it did and charmed the audience.

The ensemble comedy is also a wise play of ideas, with one big idea overshadowing it all - the triumph of performance over truth. In the school, a new teacher, Irwin (these are all last names, befitting the British practice), is brought in to make sure that the boys do well on their exams. Irwin's advice is simple, and goes against almost everything they've been taught. Don't just give your examiners a dull rehashing of what you're supposed to know; be creative so you'll stand out from the rest of them. This means that the boys are encouraged to develop seriously revisionist theories of the Holocaust, to cite just one example. It's all for show, but show is what makes you an individual. It's what wins.

Since the play is set in the 80s, the era of Margaret Thatcher's Corporate Darwinism, it was immediately thought that Bennett was sharing his dread of what England was becoming, and may have since become - the same kind of cut-throat rat-race that everyplace else is becoming, where image trumps anything deeper. Bennett denies that he had any such intention, but sometimes the zeitgeist finds its way in whether you intend it to or not.

While Bennett is clearly on to something, and although America may have a serious head start on England in the field of competitive ambition, there's a paradox in what he's doing. He's addressing the troubling rise of performance over truth by means of performance. Had Bennett wanted to write about the corruption of history, he could have written an essay - he was trained in medieval history at Oxford. Instead, he's chosen to address the problem through dramatic truth, which relies on performance and lots of charm to make its points as effectively as possible. Well, there's performance and there's performance.

It's funny that The History Boys is being released soon after The Queen by Stephen Frears came to American theaters. Frears was Bennett's longtime collaborator at the BBC, but the coincidence has more to do with overlapping ideas about what's happened to England. In The Queen, we see an aloof irrelevant monarch losing touch with her country because she doesn't understand that the people who are her subjects expect some show of feeling from her on the occasion of the death of Princess Diana, whom the queen seems to have loathed for Diana's very willingness to perform the role that the media and the public demanded.

In The History Boys, we see a school swept into the kind of opportunism and credentialism that these kinds of institutions might once have discouraged. Bennett isn't yearning for the old days when the credentials of Oxford and Cambridge were among the many entitlements of the rich. He doesn't seem to have too many illusions about Britain, reminding us in one historical aside that British soldiers who died in wars weren't even buried properly before the 20th century, and that their bones were gathered up by a Yorkshire firm and ground into powder for fertilizer. I hope the Americans who saw the play caught those lines. Officialdom and official-ese here could use some of the mockery that we get from the kids in the film. �

I'm assuming that the film was made because of the success of the play, but I think it's also safe to assume that most of the people who will see it will not have already seen it onstage.

That's an advantage probably.

Why do you say that?

Because people are rather possessive of it. Some people saw it three or four times, and they resent if you alter anything. But of course, you're bound to alter things for a film. You can't just transpose it directly. I don't mean they haven't liked it, but they then say, "Why do you do this, why do you do that?" They sort of take possession of it, which is good. It's flattering, really.

Is there something that the theater audience misunderstands about what it involves to transfer or adapt a stage play into a screenplay, and ultimately into a film?

I think a theater audience always thinks that they have a superior perception. I think they probably think they're more serious-minded, certainly in England. I don't know whether that's true. They just look at things in a slightly different way. Maybe a theater audience is more used to ambiguity than a cinema audience. A cinema audience wants more firm and obvious conclusions, I think.

I would think that the mainstream American cinema audience has been fed that for a long time.

If it were a French film, it wouldn't be anything extraordinary, because French films often are ambiguous, but English and American films quite seldom are.

One line struck me in the film, the same line that others who saw it will remember: "History is just one fucking thing after another."

It's actually not my line, in that it was said by an entirely respectable and indeed, Christian, professor at Cambridge back in the 1940s, when he said, "History's just one bloody thing after another." And I just slightly updated it. He was somebody called Herbert Butterfield, and that's how he described history. That's where it comes from.

Why did you change "bloody" to "fucking"?

That's probably what they would say now.�I don't think boys would say "bloody." They're much more foul-mouthed now. I wrote an introduction to the stage play, and I said that the difference between "bloody" and "fucking" is actually the difference between what manners were like in the 50s and what they are now. I think it probably makes it more of a theatrical line, as well.

Was "bloody" something that would have been shocking to a theater audience 40 years ago if it were said onstage?

It's like in My Fair Lady, or Pygmalion, when Eliza says, "not bloody likely," it was outrage in Shaw's time. To say that onstage would be still fairly shocking.

Your first play, also set in a school, was Forty Years On. Do you view schoolboys, or the school experience, or the teaching experience any differently than you did then? I imagine you might. Is there something about England that's changed which has shaped that?

There's something about education everywhere that's changed, in the sense that it's more goal-oriented and examination-oriented than it was, certainly in my day. Parents are so desperate for their children to qualify and get into good universities, to come away with the proper qualifications. I don't think it was like that 40 years ago, and so it means that Hector [the teacher who eschews curricula and grades, and values education for its own sake] is really a figure from the past. You seldom come across a teacher like that, simply because nowadays teachers don't have time to teach. They're so tied to a very tight schedule and to teaching the pupil to go over certain hurdles. They can't afford to be so diverse and so wandering in their approach to education as Hector is.

The scene in the French class, where pupils play clients and prostitutes in a brothel, a maison de passe, as one of them calls it, shows that education can be viewed quite broadly.

You probably come across it in England in some of the poshest schools, in schools like Winchester or Eton, but in very few others, I think.

Are we talking about the kind of credentialism that's going to shape these young men, and most of youth, for the rest of their lives?

That's absolutely true.

It's reached a point in New York City where pressure is so intense for little children to be admitted to the best nursery schools, that the children are interviewed for those places, and, by sheer logic of the numbers, most of them end up being rejected.

The notion that a child can have a sense of failure before it's even started is so dreadful, really. We were very nervous about whether the play would do well in America, but the fact that it did do so well shows that concerns there are exactly the same as concerns here, really.

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