Still, Posner speaks to me. He’s on the wrong side of the pass door, beating at the reinforced glass to be let into the party. It’s an existential condition that Alan returns to again and again in his plays. “A sense of not sharing, of being out of it,” says Hector, later in the play. “A holding back. Not being in the swim.” And no matter how gregarious my job, this always cuts me to the quick. It’s why I love his work.
But I need to talk to Alan about Posner singing “Bewitched” to Dakin, because although it’s an outstanding scene, I have a problem with Posner’s unbroken voice.
“He’s eighteen. How can his voice not be broken?” I ask.
“My voice broke very late,” says Alan.
“How late?” I ask.
“Sixteen,” says Alan.
“Eighteen is another matter,” I say, “and in any case, how do we cast it? We’ll have to cast a thirteen-year-old, because that’s the only way we’ll find someone with an unbroken voice, and all the other boys will be professional actors in their early twenties, so it won’t make any sense.”
“It makes no sense that a woman burns her husband’s precious manuscript and then shoots herself in the head,” says Alan with an air of finality, and as this is the first time I’ve ever known him to compare himself to Ibsen, I decide to drop it.
I sometimes think that he deliberately buries clues in his first drafts. The director has to sniff out the good stuff, like a pig hunting truffles. “Whatever the state of Posner’s voice, how lonely is he? How unhappy? Why isn’t Hector more upset by losing his job? He seems to sail through the play without ever engaging emotionally with anyone else, or even himself. How good a teacher is he, or is he only a classroom entertainer?”
Alan stops me before I say too much: he never likes me to labour the point, and it’s always a good idea to leave him to go off in his own direction if he’s agreeing with the general drift.
“Any ideas about casting?” I ask.
“I thought about Frances de la Tour for Mrs. Lintott,” he says.
I can immediately hear her say every line, though I’ve barely met her. In fact, the only time she’s ever talked to me was at the National Theatre company meeting when I was introduced as the new director. Frankie, as I wouldn’t have dared to call her then, was in a play in the Cottesloe. She stood up and asked if she could say a few words. “I have no idea who you are,” she said, “but on behalf of the entire profession, welcome.”
At the same moment, Alan and I realise that Hector should be Richard Griffiths, who has the wit and grace to persuade an audience to forgive him for his fumbling interferences on the motorbike. Richard comes to see me in my office, and sits gloomily on the sofa.
“I can’t turn it down,” he says.
I wonder why he’s so unhappy about it.
“It’ll bankrupt me,” he says. “I can’t live off the kind of money this place pays.”
I assure him he’ll be on knights and dames rate, the National’s special top salary. But this is a fraction of what he gets in the movies, and much less than what any leading actor can earn in television, so it doesn’t cheer him up. An hour later, after several entertaining stories about the plays he’s been in and the pittance he’s been paid for them, he accepts the part and trudges miserably out of the office.
The headmaster is easy: Clive Merrison took over Dr. Willis in The Madness of George III and we know how well he can do humourless monomania. And we meet Stephen Campbell Moore who plays the young teacher Irwin with unexpected sympathy, and seems steely enough not to let Richard Griffiths’ Hector walk all over him.
A few weeks later, we read the second draft at the National Theatre Studio. Dominic Cooper has asked to play Dakin. “I think you may be too old, to be honest,” I say to him. He points out mildly that he’s playing a twelve-year-old in His Dark Materials, so he’s reading Dakin.
Other members of the cast of His Dark Materials join the class. Ben Whishaw is Scripps, Russell Tovey is Boy 2 (most of them are still nameless) and Samuel Barnett is Posner. “All the unbroken-voice actors are busy,” I lie to Alan.
The reading is patchy. I’m excited, because the second draft has some sensational things in it. There’s a new scene at the end of Act 1: just after Hector loses his job, he returns to the classroom to find Posner waiting for a private lesson. They read through a short poem by Thomas Hardy, “Drummer Hodge,” and in talking about it they seem to answer the questions I asked about them in the first draft. How does Hector feel about being fired? Devastated. How good a teacher is he? Superb. How lonely is Posner? Very. Why does Hector seem so emotionally distant? Because he’s even lonelier than Posner.
Alan is depressed, as he always is by a first reading, but I have a whiff of how it might be after a few weeks’ rehearsal. I start to think that seventy performances won’t be enough. I ask Alan what he thought of the actors playing the history boys, but warn him not to like Ben Whishaw too much as he’s got another job playing Hamlet. Alan likes Dominic, and he thinks Russell Tovey should be Rudge, the dull, sporty boy played very well at the reading by Jamie Parker, who has let slip that he plays the piano so we’ve moved him on to Scripps. Alan also likes Sam Barnett, but insists that as his voice is broken, he’s not suitable for Posner.
“But he sings like an angel!” I say. “And we can’t cast some twelve-year-old with an unbroken voice. It would look ridiculous.”
Alan asks the casting director, Toby Whale, to arrange auditions for some child actors with unbroken voices. “Or maybe it could be a woman who looks like an eighteen-year-old boy,” he offers, trying to help. Toby looks at his shoes.
“Tell Sam Barnett to sit tight,” I growl at him when Alan leaves. “Don’t let him accept another job.”
We need actors to play Boys 1, 2, 3 and 4, and to stamp them with enough individuality to provoke the playwright into finding names for them. Toby brings in a lot more actors in their early twenties and we keep telling Alan that the thirteen-year-olds are on their way. We particularly like two Mancunians, Andrew Knott and Sacha Dhawan. Andrew reminds me of the boys I was at school with. Sacha tells us he’s going to read a poem he’s written himself.
“Did this guy train?” I whisper to Toby. “Has nobody told him that’s a bad idea?”
“He’s not trained, and he actually is eighteen, so give him a break,” mutters Toby. The poem is rather good, and Sacha reads it with such conviction that we can’t imagine turning him down. Samuel Anderson is cool, which is a tone of voice we haven’t found yet, so we want him too.
Late in the day, the door flies open and in barrels a fat guy who never stops talking. He’s either super-confident or super-nervous, but either way he’s very funny. “What have you done most recently?” I ask.
“A sitcom called Fat Friends,” he says, and cackles in delight, like the Wicked Witch of the West. He’s called James Corden, and we decide he’ll be great as Boy 4, who eventually gets a name—Timms—and a lot more lines, some of which he writes for himself.
“What about Posner?” asks Alan.
“We’ve run out of time. I’m casting Sam Barnett,” I say firmly. Alan says nothing.
A few months later, in his introduction to the published edition of the play, he concedes that as broken-voiced Posner, “the heir to the character I never quite wrote,” Sam Barnett is perfect.
A life in the theatre is a solution to any number of psychological challenges, and acting in the school play at Manchester Grammar, I was seduced by a camaraderie that seemed less fraught with emotional hazard than I was used to at home. We changed for the play in the masters’ common room, our costumes laid out on smoke-stained armchairs around a coal fire. We’d stick on false beards or strap ourselves into overstuffed bras, and settle into the armchairs, loftily passing judgement on the director. A handful of English teachers directed in turn, and each one had his fierce partisans. I was for Brian Phythian, a teacher with all Hector’s passion and charisma, and none of his faults. He ran the Dramatic S
ociety, and I wouldn’t be in the theatre today if I hadn’t found myself at his rehearsals. Forty years later, I’m still drawn to the circle around the fire, to its familial security and its clarity of purpose. And in the safety of the rehearsal room, I still confront all the stuff that threatens to be too painful in the world outside.
Sitting in Bob Crowley’s studio, talking about the designs for The History Boys, I’m thinking about Brian Phythian, my own sixth-form classroom, and the echoing corridors of my own grammar school, and I can remember them without the journey to Manchester. “Though we wouldn’t have lined up to sing a Gracie Fields number before we went off for our Oxbridge interviews,” I say to Bob. “So it’s hardly social realism.” But we both think that the aphoristic wit of Alan’s dialogue needs grounding in scruffy actuality. We fiddle around in the Lyttelton model box with some grey card walls; we put them on tracks, at right angles to each other. After a couple of hours, we’ve worked out how to get from classroom to staff room to headmaster’s study to corridor to changing room and back again. It’s the quickest we’ve ever worked: it usually takes months.
Sam Anderson, Stephen Campbell Moore, James Corden, Sacha Dhawan, Andy Knott and Jamie Parker show up for the first day of school tense and nervous. Sam Barnett, Dominic Cooper and Russell Tovey have been through His Dark Materials and know their way around, so they arrive smug, like the second form. Richard Griffiths sidles up to James. “Don’t look so frightened,” he says, “the time to get scared is when they give out the payslips.”
Then we read through the play. “Here’s the deal,” I say at the end. “There’s a lot in this play that I didn’t get till I looked it up. There’s a lot of history I didn’t know and a lot of poetry I didn’t recognise. Can we all agree that there is no question so stupid that you can’t ask it?”
We start each day with Alan teaching Auden, Larkin and Walt Whitman, and me teaching Shakespeare and Wilfred Owen. Richard, who is ferociously well read, takes all of us down forgotten literary byways, which are much funnier than Leaves of Grass. I can’t remember ever enjoying myself more. And although the company is even shorter of women than Henry V—there’s only Frankie, her understudy and the stage managers—the rehearsal-room testosterone count is low. Nobody’s playing football. Jamie and Sam Barnett sing songs from the shows at the piano. Russell and Dom puzzle out “The Whitsun Weddings.” James shares recipes. And I’m surprised how easily I play Dad, a role I didn’t think I coveted, but now seems to work fine. Maybe it’s the subject matter of the play that civilises, even feminises, a roomful of young actors who, if they’d been in Henry V, would have been as belligerent as the English army. Or maybe I’ve got lucky with these guys, who go on to spend two frictionless years together, and remain close ten years later.
They learn that Alan is a stylist as demanding as Oscar Wilde: the history boys are often far wittier and more articulate than even the cleverest Oxbridge entrant. Dakin mulls over his ordeals on the back of Hector’s motorbike. “Lecher though one is, or aspires to be, it occurs to me that the lot of woman cannot be easy, who must suffer such inexpert male fumblings virtually on a daily basis.” It’s closer to Jack Worthing than the daily banter of a Sheffield teenager, and although it needs to be rooted in concrete reality, it also needs no less breath control or intellectual élan than Restoration comedy. I encourage all the history boys to pull back on their instinctive naturalism, and think in paragraphs. They watch Richard, hear him wind his way through every long, coiling sentence and arrive faultlessly at its destination. By the fourth week, Dom tosses off the aspirant-lecher speech with the same insouciance he brings to his campaign to have sex with the headmaster’s secretary: “Apropos Passchendaele, can I bring you up to speed on Fiona?”
Richard, Frankie and Clive Merrison all know how funny the play is. The others have to take a lot of it on trust. The French scene is their Waterloo: in one of his lessons, Hector, for no good reason, possibly to make them more rounded human beings, has them improvise a brothel scene in French. Eventually I’m reduced to speaking their lines very slowly into the voice recorders on their phones, so they can parrot them back. Posner is the madame, Dakin the client.
POSNER: Bonjour, monsieur.
DAKIN: Bonjour, chérie.
POSNER: Entrez, s’il vous plait. Voilà votre lit et voici votre prostituée.
HECTOR: Oh. Ici on appelle un chat un chat.
Dom, as the client, has his trousers off, and James, as the prostitute, is going through the menu (“Pour dix francs je peux vous montrer ma prodigieuse poitrine”), when the headmaster walks into the classroom. Hector makes him speak French (“L’anglais, c’est interdit”), but the headmaster’s vocabulary is limited (“Pourquoi cet garçon…Dakin, isn’t it?…est sans ses…trousers?”). Hector smoothly explains that Dakin is a wounded soldier, “un mutilé de guerre,” in a field hospital at Ypres. The class ditches the brothel scene and moans in agony. By the fifth week of rehearsal, most of them are on top of the French, but they’re dreading playing it to an audience, as they assume everyone will be as mystified as they are.
As I sit in the Lyttelton waiting for the first preview I remember what it’s like when an audience decides a play isn’t doing it for them, and there’s not much you can do backstage after the show beyond trying to keep everybody’s spirits up. More often, I’ve sat in preview audiences who don’t quite know what they think, in which case you must do what you can to make the show more persuasive. But from the moment Richard first strides on in his motorbike gear, this audience decides that The History Boys is the play they’ve been waiting to see.
About five minutes in, Frankie and Richard are discussing the universities they went to. “Durham was very good for history,” says Frankie, bone dry, “it’s where I had my first pizza. Other things, too, of course, but it’s the pizza that stands out.” The audience roars as if it’s the first funny line they’ve ever heard in a theatre.
A couple of minutes later, it’s the French lesson, and they explode. Clive Merrison and Steve Campbell Moore are waiting in the wings for their entrance. “Jesus,” says Clive, “we’re going to kill this stone dead.” But there’s nothing that an English audience likes more than someone caught with his trousers down, so when the headmaster comes on and sees Dakin in his underpants, they go nuclear.
Soon the laughs start coming for lines that aren’t even funny. “You’re very young, sir,” says Sacha as Akthar to Steve as Irwin, during one of Irwin’s lessons. “This isn’t your gap year, is it, sir?” Who knew? Certainly not Sacha, whose first professional play this is, so his mum and dad are here to see him hit the back of the net.
During the first half, most of the cast get to speak directly to the audience, but it’s ten minutes into Act 2 before Frankie, after a vexing confrontation with the headmaster, turns front. “I have not hitherto been allotted an inner voice,” she says after a lethally timed pause, landing perhaps the biggest laugh of the evening, “my role a patient and not unamused sufferance of the predilections and preoccupations of men.”
Frankie is less surprised by the response than I am. “I’m talking to them about my whole career, darling,” she tells me later. “The woman never gets the inner voice. They realise that.” Which is why they cheer when she asks the class: “Can you, for a moment, imagine how dispiriting it is to teach five centuries of masculine ineptitude?” Alan writes a part for her in all his subsequent plays.
“How do you define history, Mr. Rudge?” Frankie asks quick-witted Russell playing slow-witted Rudge in a mock interview.
“How do I define history?” repeats Russell. “It’s just one fucking thing after another.”
Another perfectly timed laugh, and the audience has developed an appetite for the play’s considerable substance so they recognise another contribution to one of its central debates. But they are blindsided by Thomas Hardy and “Drummer Hodge.” After the disastrous interview with the headmaster that leads to him losing his job, Hector finds Posner waiti
ng alone in the classroom.
“What have we learned this week?” asks Hector, and Posner speaks by and from the heart:
They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
Uncoffined—just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
That breaks the veldt around;
And foreign constellations west
Each night above his mound.
Young Hodge the Drummer never knew—
Fresh from his Wessex home—
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
Strange stars amid the gloam.
Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge for ever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellations reign
His stars eternally.
By the end of Sam’s recitation, the silence in the auditorium is tangible, thick with concentration. How does the death of poor Hodge speak so keenly across the decades about a heartsick student and a ruined old man? “Any thoughts?” asks Hector. “Anything about his name?”
And at last, Hector puts aside foolish things, and opens the door to literature. “The important thing,” he says, “is that he has a name,” and he tells Posner about the Zulu and Boer wars:
the first campaigns when soldiers…or common soldiers…were commemorated, the names of the dead recorded and inscribed on war memorials…So, thrown into a common grave though he may be, he is still Hodge the drummer. Lost boy though he is on the other side of the world, he still has a name.
Balancing Acts Page 14