The History Boys returns to the West End after 20 years

Back at the Haymarket in April

The History Boys, Alan Bennett's play about eight sixth formers at a Sheffield grammar school in the 1980s, is returning to London's West End for the first time in 20 years. The producers say the original National Theatre production opens at the Theatre Royal Haymarket on 10 April 2027 for a 16-week run, and tickets are on sale now through the production's official site.

Nicholas Hytner, who directed the play when it opened at the National Theatre in 2004 and directed the 2006 film, is directing again. He is reunited with the production's original designer, Bob Crowley, and Bennett will be involved in developing the revival, as Nadia Khomami, The Guardian's arts and culture correspondent, reported when the return was announced on 22 October.

The producers bill it as the return of the landmark National Theatre production rather than a new staging, and describe the play as subversive, poignant and deeply funny: a story of sex, school politics and a battle of wills between teachers, set against the changing face of 1980s England.

Nadia Khomami reported this first for The Guardian. Checked against The History Boys: official production site.

Why Hytner says it matters now

Hytner has tied the revival to a live argument about what schools should teach. He told The Guardian that humanities subjects have declined in state schools, that music and drama teaching in particular has fallen away sharply, and that history and modern languages have been downgraded. He called the neglect of the humanities a mistake, both for individual pupils and for the country's economic future.

He went further on technology. Much of what state education focused on over the last 20 years, he said, is proving beside the point now that artificial intelligence can do so much of what pupils were being prepared to do, and schools could do a lot worse than introduce pupils to creativity and the pleasure of other people's creativity. The play, in his view, argues that the humanities are the birthright of everyone who goes through school, not subjects whose worth depends on an immediate practical use.

He also hopes it will speak to a generation raised on social media. Many young people, he said, are ambivalent about it, and crave the kind of spontaneous conversation and deep concentration the play celebrates.

The timing is pointed. The government is carrying out the first major revision of the national curriculum and GCSEs in more than a decade. An expert panel led by Professor Becky Francis was commissioned in July 2024 and published its final report in November 2025. Public consultations opened in September 2026, with a revised curriculum expected in spring 2027, the season the play reopens, and changes in schools from 2028, The Guardian reported.

What Bennett said

Hytner said he had asked Bennett whether he wanted to see the play revived, and that although Bennett is not usually keen on revivals of his work, he said he would love to see this one again.

"The History Boys is one of the happiest plays I've written," Bennett said in a statement reported by The Guardian. He added that it was one of the quickest to write, taking far less than his usual five years, that the play is full of quotations and has itself become very quotable, and that he welcomed its return under Hytner.

Bennett, who turned 90 in 2024, has described the play as the start of a late creative renaissance. He told Mark Lawson for The Guardian that he had long given up hope of writing anything really fresh before The History Boys, that the actors treated him as part of the cast, and that the first preview fell on his 70th birthday.

The play

The History Boys follows eight boys at a Sheffield grammar school preparing for their Oxford and Cambridge entrance exams in the 1980s. Two teachers take opposite approaches to their education: one sees learning as a route to achievement and exam success, the other as an end in itself. The play is sharply comic and poignant, and deals with adolescence, sexuality and what history is for.

At its centre is Hector, the boys' eccentric general studies teacher, a role created on stage and screen by Richard Griffiths. Frances de la Tour and James Corden were also in the original 2004 cast. The official production site leads with one of the play's best-known lines, from one of the boys: history is "just one f***ing thing after another".

Hytner has recalled that even the original cast doubted one of the play's most farcical scenes, in which Hector has his pupils act out, in French, a client's visit to a Paris brothel, a charade that ends with the headmaster walking in on one boy with his trousers down. Only a couple of the young actors thought it was funny. At the first preview it brought the house down, and Hytner said he remembered the look of stunned amazement on their faces.

From the National to Broadway

The History Boys had its world premiere at the National Theatre in 2004. It transferred to the West End and then to Broadway, winning three Olivier awards in London and six Tony awards in New York, and it was later voted the nation's favourite play. A film version, also directed by Hytner, followed in 2006.

It launched several careers. James Corden, Russell Tovey and Dominic Cooper were among the young actors playing the boys, and all three went on to become well known on stage and screen.

Hytner has said the revival will change, as the production did between its opening at the National and the end of its Broadway run in 2006, but that any changes will be made with Bennett's input.

A new cast of unknowns

No casting has been announced. Hytner has made clear that the boys will again be played by actors at the start of their careers, as they were in 2004. He told The Guardian he could almost guarantee that none of the new cast would be well-known names, because that is the point of them.

That was how the original worked. The young actors who played the boys in 2004 were largely unknown when they were cast, and the play is now remembered as the one that launched them.

Hector and how the play reads now

The play is not without controversy. A 2024 revival at the Theatre Royal, Bath drew criticism over Hector, whose sexual interest in his pupils goes unrebuked in the play, Mark Lawson noted in his interview with Bennett that year.

Bennett has always declined to condemn the character. He told Lawson that he saw Hector partly as a reflection of his own tentativeness about sex when young, and that his view was and is that the boys were more sophisticated and more alert to the world than their teacher. He said he could not defend it beyond that. Hytner has not said whether the new production will change how Hector is presented, only that any changes will be made with Bennett.

Bennett and Hytner

The revival reunites one of British theatre's longest partnerships. Bennett and Hytner have worked together on 11 theatre and screen projects over about 30 years, including The Madness of George III, which opened at the National Theatre in 1991, Bennett's hospital play Allelujah! in 2018 and The Choral, a 2025 film starring Ralph Fiennes and Roger Allam about a Yorkshire choral society in the first world war. Bennett has said he owes much of his late career to Hytner and to his partner, Rupert Thomas.

Bennett, born and brought up in Leeds, has set much of his work in Yorkshire, and the voice of the county runs through The History Boys. Before university he did national service, where he was sent on a Russian translation course alongside another future playwright, Michael Frayn, while the rest of his squad was sent to Korea. He told Lawson the course had been like university before university.

His work has kept coming in his 90s. Killing Time, a novella set in a care home, was published in 2024. His diaries for 2016 to 2024 cover the pandemic years, the film of Allelujah! starring Judi Dench, Derek Jacobi and Jennifer Saunders, and the making of The Choral, which the Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw reviewed as an unsentimental but deeply felt drama. The Uncommon Reader, his 2006 novella in which Queen Elizabeth II becomes a passionate reader, is the work he told Lawson he enjoyed writing more than any other. During the pandemic the BBC remade his Talking Heads monologues from the 1980s, with two new ones added. He has turned down both a CBE and a knighthood, telling Lawson that honours felt to him less like trinkets than shackles.

Bennett began his career in the 1960s satire Beyond the Fringe with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller. His latest book, Enough Said, a volume of diaries from 2016 to 2024, was published by Faber this year.

What happens next

The run starts on 10 April 2027 and lasts 16 weeks. No date has been given for a casting announcement. Tickets are sold through the production's official site and the Theatre Royal Haymarket.

We do not list The History Boys on NeedATicket at the moment. If it appears on StubHub, we will track its prices every hour. You can set a watch below and we will email you if it is listed.