The History Boys – 2006 | 109 mins | Drama, Comedy | Colour

Plot Synopsis

Starring the original award-winning stage cast, and adapted for the screen by the original playwright Alan Bennett, The History Boys brings together eight bright, funny history students in the north of England in the mid ’80s. With its original director, the National Theatre’s Nicholas Hytner, in place, the touching drama mixes broad comedy with a heartfelt call for radical imagination in the classroom before reaching its satisfying conclusion. The cast are a collection of unlikely stereotypes from Richard Griffiths’ lecherous homosexual to student Samuel Barnett’s Jewish outsider but the performances are uniformly excellent.

Sheffield 1983, a headmaster (Clive Merrison) is obsessed with breaking into the ranks of those schools that regularly send undergraduates to Oxford and Cambridge and enlists teacher Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore), a shrewd newcomer, to coach the gifted yet unruly sixth-form history students into intellectual shape for the trials ahead. Seduced though they are by the exam-busting bag of tricks offered by the temporary supply teacher, the boys are torn by their loyalty to the hugely eccentric, poetry-spouting English master Hector (Richard Griffiths). As they prepare for the daunting admissions process, the journey of the History Boys becomes as much about how education works as it is about where education leads.