[rambling thoughts that may be of absolutely no interest even to those few who saw the play]
[spolier alert to the extent I’ll discuss plot elements]
I saw this play a little while back. The NYT was shlobbing the knob of Alan Bennett and everyone else associated with the play, and I’ve read lots of other glowing encomia. A film version of it is coming out later this year.
I’m not so sure.
The acting was good. Staging kind of neat.
And I liked the fact they used '80s music (but it was weird that none of the characters seemed to have any interest therein, instead preferring Hector’s ragtime-era stuff, which I have to think fairly odd).
But I didn’t find it as . . . profound, or great, or whatever as others seem to, and as my companion did. And parts of it just left me cold, or annoyed.
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Setting it in Thatcher’s Britain tells me Bennett, like some aging hippie professor with an anti-Nixon poster on his wall, just has a chip on his shoulder. On the one hand, the silliness of academics hardly came into being in the '80s. On the other hand, the slick, glib, yuppie careerism that Bennett tars Irwin with was hardly emergent when Thatcher was battliing the miners, and is (AFAICT) a far more real phenomenon in Tony Blair’s and Alistair Campbell’s New Labour world than in Thatcher’s. I suppose you could say Bennet posits the '80s as the tipping point for when the good old ways went out the window and a new ethos later filled the vacuum?
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Structurally, I’m not sure that Bennett ever really achieves the juxtaposing of two different views of history that others have said they see in the play. Because Hector is not a history teacher (though he weighs in on occasions with opposition to Irwin’s methods/approach to history), I don’t hear him offering a coherent alternate view of how to Be A Historian. If anything, I take away that his “general studies” is meant as a reproach of focusing on any one subject. Okay. But these kids are going to be history majors. Criticize them for that choice, not the tutor for trying to help them succeed at their chosen vocation, no?
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At least as early as Lucky Jim, I think the point has been amply made that history, academic history, is in large part jerk-offery. Remember Dixon’s hilarious self-hating explosions as he contemplated his contrived premise about medieval shipbuilding techniques or whatever it was (“This strangely neglected topic . . . this what neglected topic? This strangely what topic? This strangely neglected what? His thinking all this without having defiled and set fire to the typescript only made him appear to himself as more of a hypocrite and fool.”). Anyone who’s read or written academic articles knows what a large proportion of modern academic study consists of precisely what Irwin is trying to do – find new angles on old topics. Repeating that the First World War was a bad experience that hurt the English does not advance any (professional or academic) ball much. And since it is easier to find new angles on old facts than to find new facts on long-past events, which is going to be more common?
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Hector criticizes Irwin for turning the boys into mere performing automatons for the Examiners. Which, strangely enough, is what Hector seems to be doing by teaching them to belt out his little “bits” of songs, snatches of poetry, etc. Is he really challenging them to think for themselves, or is he, in his own way, just another bullying stage parent?
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Bennett’s an elitist though I’m sure he disagrees. The “old fashioned” kind of teaching and education he clearly longs for, as exemplified by Hector, was viable (if at all) for a small class of high-achieving boys, who could dawdle their way through an eccentric, esoteric, individualized curriculum with the luxury of polymath dons to bounce their ideads off. And they could avoid anything as crass as treating academia or learning as a path to professionalism or credentials because, hey, many of them didn’t need to work. Of course as education (secondary education especially) became more widely available, to a more disparate group of people, head-in-the-clouds Renaissance Man study-for-study’s-sake became less viable for the educators and for the students (and was probably less likely to be of interest or use to those who didn’t want to be Renaissance men but could nonethteless better their lot in life by education.
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Secondary characters (the headmaster and the female teacher) – not so good. Head was made to appear a complete twat for wanting his kids (and yes, him) to transcend their provincial orgiins. Mrs. Lintott was given an oddly jarring, you-go-girl feminist rant about how men had screwed up history (much of which, along with a lot of whatever is good in life, was made in part by men).
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I’m surprised the English like Bennett so much, as the play as a whole seems to give aid and comfort to the non-U.K. view that Brits are all a bunch of flaming nancy boys. Is the stereotypical English public school homoeroticism really something people want to showcase? And Bennett really shows questionable judgment and timing in his blase, no-harm, no-foul, essentially forgiving treatment of what I thought we had come to a consensus was Not Okay, namely a teacher deriving sexual gratification from his pupils. “He was a good man,” the eulogy to Hector goes, and I guess we are supposed to agree. But I’m not sure I buy it – good men don’t diddle their pupils, and it worries me to think that Bennett might intend his light treatment of Hector’s ‘foibles’ in this line as some form of apologia for impulses he might himself have. More broadly, while Hector may have had concern for the boys (not an un-self-interested concern), what other evidence do we have that he was “good?” Or that Irwin, by implication, wasn’t? As far as I can tell, we’re expected to accept it because of his airy artsy talk – anyone who quotes poetry is an Artist, and Artists see and embody the good. Whatever.
I think I saw this movie before, when it was called Dead Poet’s Society.