Head of the Class

THE HISTORY BOYSMAKES ITS BROADWAY DEBUT

It's the quiet ones that bear watching. Their talents tick to a different clock. The mild, bespectacled Alan Bennett was the self-effacing one in the 60s comedy troupe Beyond the Fringe, warm milk compared with the flash and fizz of Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook, and Dudley Moore. But as his former mates have receded into period idols, Bennett has moved beyond the fringe into the active center. With deceptive ease and no discernible rash of ego, Bennett has tapped out a succession of plays, screenplays, television dramas, diaries, and memoirs, each imprinted with his patient sensibility. His most recent London smash, the multiple-award-winning The History Boys, makes its Broadway debut on April 23 at the Broadhurst with the original cast, including that portly steam engine Richard Griffiths. Set in a northern-England grammar school in the grasping 80s, the play pits the fiery ambition of youth against the accumulated slush of middle age. "Once in a slack period of the afternoon when we were being particularly un-bright," Bennett recalls of his student days in Untold Stories, out this month (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), "the French master put his head down on the desk and wailed, 'Why am I wasting my life in this godforsaken school?' ... The incident stuck in my mind, I suppose, because it was a revelation to me at the time ... that masters had inner lives (or lives at all)." Prying open inner lives with a delicate knack, the playwright releases pent-up forces that carom around the classroom with the elegance of pure physics.

JAMES WOLCOTT

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