In a piece included in his just-published essay collection Untold Stories, the superb English playwright Alan Bennett writes that "good directors are often good teachers" and adds that "theater is often at its most absorbing when it's school." This view is not likely to be endorsed by the tired businessman who's considering a night at a Broadway show. Of course, Bennett -- a donnish figure even when he was one of the Beyond the Fringe jesters -- means that in good drama and comedy, moral lessons are passed on in cunning disguises.

Bennett's The History Boys is explicitly about teachers and schoolboys and what constitutes a true education. It may well be the best bloody play to have opened e[...]