It is always a great risk taking a popular play from the stage and transferring it onto the silver screen. If you can endure the criticism from theater purists and dumb it down enough for mainstream America to be entertained, then there is room for a bit of success.
Rob Marshall found great mainstream success with Chicago, infusing it with Hollywood talent that blew audiences away. Other stage to screen adaptations, such as Joel Shumacher’s The Phantom of the Opera, have been well received by critics, but shunned by the American audience in that they were too difficult to follow on the silver screen.
In cases like these, and many others, it often rests on the vision of the director and how he or she decides to interpret the small world of stage into the vast realm of film. With The History Boys, while director Nicholas Hynter shows plenty of vision in making a film that does the play justice, he just may not capture the minds and hearts of the American moviegoer.
The History Boys tells the story of a troupe of young students in England who are preparing to make their way to either Cambridge or Oxford, the beacons of Britain’s educational system. They are crass and unruly, yet they are very gifted. Instead of attempting to retrofit new talent into the roles of these boys, Hynter brought in the original cast of the play that ran in London’s National Theater in 2004. The result is one of the more natural ensembles of the year. It is easy to see that these young men are very comfortable in these characters and comfortable with each other. The dialogue is seamless, the musical interludes are expertly placed and the film takes on a welcome air of lightheartedness and irreverence.
Article comments
1 - handyguy
I find it difficult to take The History Boys very seriously as either a play or a movie, but it is a fairly entertaining sitcom, more sophisticated than most and with excellent actors. All the stuff about two methods of teaching seems to me just a McGuffin to hang the jokes on. And many of the jokes and the performers delivering them are very charming.
I also detected in the stage version some uncomfortable 'internalized homophobia,' self-hatred by the closeted gay characters, not artfully enough dramatized by author Alan Bennett to accomplish anything other than leaving a bad aftertaste. This has been considerably trimmed down in the film version, and the piece is better for it.