Quotes of the Day

It's a wonder the modern world can find a place for Alan Bennett. In an age of braying, he whispers. In a pop culture consecrated to Don Juan, he seems the grayish professor — a wan don. His plays, for stage and TV, are subtle comedies about daft people (The Madness of George III, The Lady in the Van) or lost ones (An Englishman Abroad, Talking Heads). His method is understatement, indirection, irony. "In England, we never entirely mean what we say, do we?" a Bennett character declares in the 1977 play The Old Country. "Do I mean that? Not entirely."

Yet an argument can be made (though never, never by Bennett himself) that he is the foremost English playwright. Certainly the most English playwright, if by that we mean the dramatist who alchemizes the manners and rancor of the quiet middle class into delicious and troubling comedy. He's been at it since 1960, when, at 26, he and three other Oxbridge wits wrote and performed the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe. Bennett turned 70 a few weeks ago, and marked the milestone with a grand new play — his longest (at nearly three hours) and funniest — called The History Boys. Opening to critical raves, it is the season's sold-out hit at the National Theatre in London and has already been set for a Broadway production. By Bennett standards, that's almost gaudy.

In a British grammar school, perhaps 20 years ago, eight bright lads have passed their A-level exams and are now studying for tests that will determine which university they attend. Oxford or Cambridge would be lovely, the school's headmaster (Clive Merrison) believes. To help get his sixth-formers into one of the posh places, he hires Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore), a clever young man just down from university, to help the boys impress their imminent inquisitors. Say the unexpected, he tells them; nurture the odd fact, such as that at the time of the Reformation "14 foreskins of Christ" had been preserved. Don't just be right; that's boring. Make an impression!

Hector (Richard Griffiths), the boys' huge, studiously eccentric English teacher, doesn't care where they end up, doesn't believe in the utility of literature. "Useless Knowledge," that's his passion, "the department of Why Bother?" The boys know Larkin's and Auden's and Hardy's poems by heart. But Hector also encourages them to sing Gracie Fields songs, to enact scenes from '40s film romances and, in a hilarious set piece, to polish their French by improvising an encounter in a brothel. Despite his peccadilloes — like the occasional grope when he takes them for a ride on his motorbike — the boys cherish Hector. He has given them the vocation, the job and the joy of "breaking bread with the dead"; to be infused by the culture handed down to them. "Mr. Hector's stuff's not meant for the exam, sir," one of the boys tells Irwin. "It's to make us more rounded human beings."

Put that way, it sounds wet. But Bennett wants us to consider what we learn and why we learn it. He believes that millennia of poetry, plays, history can be as fulfilling as everything we think we need to know from right now. He is defiantly anachronistic, like the more enlightened headmaster in his first stage play, Forty Years On. Told his standards are out-of-date, the headmaster snaps, "Standards are always out-of-date. That's what makes them standards."

Bennett loves the old standards; by now he is one — a cultural conservative with a liberal message. At times, he stoops to editorializing. To underline Irwin's seductive malevolence, Bennett begins the play in the present, where Irwin is now instructing politicians how to lie — to defend a severe new law by telling constituents that "loss of liberty is the price we pay for freedom." At the end, the playwright piles on the codas, explaining in faux-documentary style what became of the lads, even providing a violent death. That's an odd exclamation point to a Bennett sentence that should end in ellipsis. It's as if he was afraid his students in the audience were too dull to get the point.

Bennett can be forgiven the polemic, for he has brought to brilliant life a dozen original characters: four adults (including Frances de la Tour as a teacher who says history is simply "centuries of male ineptitude" and "women behind them, with a bucket") and the eight boys, each smartly defined, each bright, each needy or greedy. On stage, the evening belongs to Griffiths, as a pied piper of "useless" culture. But the mind behind it is Bennett's, as wry and sly as ever. The History Boys shows that a buoyant comedy can provide a splendid education. And do we mean that? Entirely.

• RICHARD CORLISS | London
• At 70, Alan Bennett has a new play that brims with laughs and love for learning