Beyond a joke

This week the National Theatre opened another new play — its seventh — by Alan Bennett. For those who know only his earlier work, Bennett remains the Queen Mother of British literature, a national treasure adored by all for his cosy charm and twinkly-eyed naughtiness. But anyone who holds this view has clearly not seen, or is blind to the failings of, his recent work. For me, sitting through new Alan Bennett plays has increasingly become like discovering that in old age the Queen Mother developed a sideline as a flasher.

Of course, the quality of all writers’ work varies. But few have fallen off so steeply or horribly as Bennett. At one point this original member of the Beyond the Fringe quartet appeared to have real creative longevity. The magnificent Single Spies, the television Talking Heads and some of the prose found deservedly vast audiences. But over the past decade something has gone wrong. The fly in the ointment became the main feature and, long before the recent book Smut, what once looked like honesty seems to have turned into something rancid.

The History Boys opened at the National in May 2004, won five-star reviews and multiple awards, was made into a film and launched the careers of its young stars. Ostensibly set in the sixth form of an all-boys grammar school in the north of England in the 1980s, several critics noted that it more resembled one from the 1950s when Bennett was growing up. In truth, however, it was not like any school from any decade. For a start, almost everybody in the school — teachers and pupils — either is, wishes to be, or can be persuaded to be, gay. And not just gay, but in the case of the teachers gaily abusive, and in the case of the pupils happily abused.