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The History Boys |
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What the critics had to say...
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"A highly articulate examination of academic game-playing and a huge popular success for the National Theatre.
THE HISTORY BOYS serves up entertaining wit and wonderful epigrams and exchanges."
-- Ben Brantley, New York Times
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"Hugely enjoyable. Whether Bennett's mind turns to teaching, history or youth, it's always curious, intelligent,
witty and hilarious. Where will you see better performances from very young men then those Nicholas Hytner has
coaxed from the eight history boys? They're as bright, bold and resilient as sunlight itself."
-- Benedict Nightingale, Times of London
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"A grand new play. THE HISTORY BOYS brims with laughs and love for learning. Bennett has brought to
life a dozen original characters: four adults, and the eight boys, each smartly defined, each bright, each needy and
greedy. On stage, the evening belongs to Richard 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."
-- Richard Corliss, Time
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"This is not only Bennett's finest play but an unmistakable modern masterpiece. There is a thematic richness, a
generous wit combined with great depth of feeling, above all a sense of a writer joyously at the very top of his
game. It is a play that captures just how it feels to be an anxious, testosterone-troubled adolescent on the brink of
adult life, and also what it is like to be nearing the end of one's career, and carrying a terrible sense of failure.
THE HISTORY BOYS is packed with superb one-liners that are surely destined to enter the Oxford D
ictionary of Quotations. But this is a play with depth as well as dazzle - intensely moving as well as
thought-provoking and funny. I can think of no other living British writer who combines great art and great
entertainment with such runaway popular success as Alan Bennett. Nicholas Hytner's cracking production appears to be
unstoppable."
-- Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph
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"Nothing could diminish the incendiary achievement of this subtle, deep-wrought and immensely funny play about the
value and meaning of education. In short, a superb, life-enhancing play."
-- Michael Billington, The Guardian
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"Brilliantly funny, with lines that we will, I hope, be quoting for years to come and several show-stopping
vignettes. Bennett is still naughty, impish, endlessly ironic. But by the end, tears are as near as laughter.
THE HISTORY BOYS is moving, disquieting: one follows it with a heart brimful...This is Bennett's
first play this millennium, and it more than repays the wait; I think it his finest work in decades."
-- Alastair Macaulay, Financial Times
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