Review: The History Boys ****

THE Playhouse has landed a coup by winning the rights to stage the first professional production of Alan Bennett's masterpiece since its triumphant first appearance at the National Theatre six years ago.

It became one of the most well received new plays of the decade. Triumph in the West End turned into success on Broadway, and seemed to strike a chord with audiences around the world.

The one thing this production should have arrived with was oodles of confidence, but instead it comes on stage like a shy creature, blinking in the light.

This is manifest from the start. Irwin's opening speech, surprisingly difficult for an actor given the usual clarity of the writer, is garbled, under-performed and seemingly mis-understood by Ben Lambert. Fortunately, he regains composure and ends up giving one of the best performances of the evening.

The History Boys tells the story of eight schoolboys, who have performed well enough in their A-levels to go on to study for Oxbridge exams. They spend a term at school studying under the tutelage of pederast Hector, who inspires his boys with a love of learning and terrifies them with high speed gropes on the back of his motorbike.

The headmaster brings in bright spark Irwin, an Oxford graduate to teach the boys "techniques" to help them pass the Oxbridge exams.

There are some false notes in the casting of the boys – Kyle Redmond-Jones isn't quite good-looking enough to play Dakin and James Byng's Posner is a little too good-looking – but overall these boys shine. The duff performances come, disappointingly, from the teachers – in particular Gerard Murphy as Hector.

Murphy is a fine stage actor with an impressive pedigree, but here he allows the role to swallow him up.

His Hector becomes a sweaty, nervous character with whom it is difficult to sympathise. His performance is a microcosm of the problems with the whole production. I wanted him to storm out on to the stage and confront the boys and the audience. Instead we get a strangely apologetic version of a modern classic.

Yet it's testament to Bennett's writing that despite all these reservations, it remains a truly wonderful play and still worth seeing.