Making History

Back so soon? Just weeks after the Tony Award-winning production of The History Boys closed on Broadway, the film version of Alan Bennett’s play about a group of English schoolboys torn between two teachers opens this week — with the same cast, including Tony Award winners Richard Griffiths and Frances de la Tour, as the stage show. In case you’re wondering, this wasn’t the quickest-made film in history; it was shot over a year ago, during the show’s critically acclaimed London run.

TheaterMania recently spoke about the stage-to-screen transition with Samuel Barnett, who plays the sensitive homosexual Posner; Dominic Cooper, who plays the cocky, sexually aggressive Dakin; and director Nicholas Hytner, who also won a Tony for the Broadway production.

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THEATERMANIA: Do you feel the transition to film has been successful?

SAMUEL BARNETT: The feedback that we’ve had — particularly in America — has been that people seem to feel it is. They said it doesn’t look like someone stuck a camera in front of the stage and pressed “record,” yet the film hasn’t been opened out so that you haven’t lost the authenticity of the school setting..

THEATERMANIA: What was the strangest thing about watching yourselves onscreen?

DOMINIC COOPER: The oddest thing for me, watching the film, was how different my character actually is from how I perceived him to be. I was quite shocked by how revolting I was.

THEATERMANIA: Was it a very difficult or challenging shoot?

SAMUEL BARNETT: In every way, it’s been the best one that I’ve ever had. Our crew had all worked on The Madness of King George with Alan and Nick, so they knew each other inside out and they completely looked after us. The shoot was just 30 days, no weekends; and Nick was anxious not to shoot anything that would end up on the cutting room floor, because we had such a short time to get this done and we didn’t get that many takes. Some scenes you did once and they said, “That’s fine, we’ve got it,” and that would be the scene that they used. As a cast, we had been together for a year, so not only did we know the lines but we knew intimately our relationships with one another. I think that comes across in the film.

THEATERMANIA: Do you wish they would have waited to do the film until the Broadway run was over?

DOMINIC COOPER: Over the three years we did the play, we were discovering things everyday, even up until the last performance on Broadway. So it was odd, after having done the play for another year on stage and having discovered so much more, to then suddenly see a performance that was a year old. Of course, there’s nothing you can do about that. You have to trust that what’s on screen were your instincts at the time.

THEATERMANIA: The character of Posner seems a bit less depressed in the film, and he’s been given a somewhat happier ending than in the play’s epilogue. Were you pleased with that development, Sam?

SAMUEL BARNETT: I was really pleased how Nick got me to lighten some of the scenes which on the stage could be so “woe is me.” Otherwise, Posner should slit his wrists by the end. As for the epilogue, it just seemed too much for Posner to have such a bleak ending, like he did in the play.

THEATERMANIA: Nick, what was like it for you to work on this film, having been involved with the play for so many years?

NICHOLAS HYTNER: One of the reasons for making the film, to be honest, was simply to capture the performances and the material. Another reason is because I felt that there was a real opportunity to look at it differently — to get a camera in close and get the point of view, as it were, of a participant in the room.

THEATERMANIA: With so many gay and bisexual characters in the film, are you concerned that this will be labeled “a gay movie” and therefore not be seen by certain audiences?

NICHOLAS HYTNER: It’s never really been a concern. I hope that it will be seen by the kind of people who would enjoy it. The film was made for 2 million pounds and has already taken in more or less 4 million in the U.K., so everything else is a bonus. Yes, a disproportionate number of the characters in the film are gay as far as the the proportion of gay people in the population at large, but the issues that the film deals with are intellectual issues: the purpose of education, whether there is such a thing as historical truth, and the degree to which bad faith in the reporting of history suggests that bad faith in political discourse might be connected. The piece is not driven by emotional and sexual issues. As much as I’d like the film to play as widely as possible, one thing I’ve discovered in running the National Theatre in London is that one of the things you have to do, as well as saying “please come,” is to sometimes say firmly but gently: “Don’t come, it’s not for you.”

THEATERMANIA: Stage-to-screen adaptations often fail because they are “opened up” too much. How concerned were you about this?

NICHOLAS HYTNER: The world of The History Boys is the school, and therefore we realized very early on that the film we would make would be unashamed of the fact that it was set in an enclosed world. I’m not comparing it to these films at all, but I thought about A Streetcar Named Desire, The Philadelphia Story and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? because those three film adaptations stay in their small world. They stick all their energy into the exploration of the people; they are character-driven and they are dialogue-driven. You don’t see Elia Kazan worrying much about Louisiana.

THEATERMANIA: The play is set in the 1980s. Do you think the story would work in 2006?

NICHOLAS HYTNER: It would be much harder. Firstly, in English schools, you can’t teach like Hector anymore. The 1980s was the battleground, when the national curriculum was introduced and schools started to be supervised much more closely; they were required to reach targets and deliver certain results. The 1980s was the last time that teachers like Hector existed. I also think kids now are much more aware that a hand on the knee or a hand feeling them from behind on a motorbike is something that they should they report. My experience was at a school very similar to the one in the play in that there were several teachers who put their hands on students. We didn’t actually think it was untoward, or maybe we just thought it was vaguely untoward. But I suppose now you would know it was untoward, and that’s probably correct.