Following worldwide success on the stage, the film adaptation of Alan Bennett's queer-leaning play The History Boys opens in limited release in the United States today, with the original principal cast and director Nicholas Hytner (The Madness of King George) on board. Set in an all-male prep school in 1983 suburban Britain, The History Boys follows eight recent graduates who have obtained the A-level scores needed to gain entrance interviews to Cambridge and Oxford.

In order to ensure that the young men are prepared, the headmaster draws up a rigorous program in which they are presented with differing — and often conflicting — teaching styles from teachers Hector (Richard Griffiths), Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore) and Mrs. Lintott (Frances de la Tour). “I feel very, very strongly — and it's something that I really like to say because I believe it — that a proper education, and particularly an education in the liberal arts, makes it impossible to be intolerant,” says director Nicholas Hytner. “Makes it impossible not to respect the diversity of human nature.”

Factor in the young men's budding sexuality and ambition (not to mention a few sexual entanglements with the faculty and staff) and you're in for a pretty potent exchange of ideas.

Given the more sensational aspects of the story, it would be understandable if the filmmakers were concerned that the film's gay content might result in The History Boys being labeled a “gay film,” a distinction that could equal box office poison here in the States.

But Hytner doesn't seem terrible worried. “Quite a lot of the people that I've been speaking to here — they still think ‘gay' is an issue,” he says. “And it's just 12 people [in this movie]. Yes, a disproportionate number of them are gay, I suppose, as far as the proportion of gay people in the population at large, but they're just gay — the issues that the film deals with are intellectual issues. The issues are the purpose of education, whether there is such a thing as historical truth, the degree to which bad faith in the reporting of history, perhaps, suggests that bad faith in the political discourse might be connected. Those are the issues. There are no social and emotional issues. There are huge sexual and emotional undercurrents, but these are simply 12 people.”

Richard Griffiths (perhaps best known for his turns in Withnail & I and the Harry Potter films), who plays the closeted, gay teacher Hector, offers: “There's something about sexuality that terrifies authority and makes authority want to control it. I remember reading with deep hilarity — and you'll have to forgive me because it's rude of me as a foreigner, but I was in hysterics when I read that there are apparently five states in the 50 [states of America ] which criminalize oral sex. Well, how would you know that someone was doing it? As if it was anybody else's concern?”

As Hector, who is beloved by the students despite his unconventional teaching style and tendency to put his hands where they don't belong, Griffiths had to contemplate the forces that could lead a man to live a life of denial. “He is compromised,” Griffiths says. “He is wrapped up in a thousand yards of barbed wire of compromise. His marriage is a compromise; his sexuality is compromised. … Eventually there's a point where he realizes that the boys couldn't give a shit about where he comes from, and he says ‘what persuaded me to piss my life away in this God-forsaken place, what an idiot I've been,' and then he breaks down — and that's his lowest moment. And that's all about getting it wrong.”

Frances de la Tour plays Hector's no-nonsense friend and colleague Mrs. Lintott (or “Totty,” as the boys call her), who juggles her affection for Hector and the boys with her belief that, as she succinctly puts it, “history is women following behind with the bucket.” But when it is revealed that Hector is manhandling his male students despite being married, she is surprisingly pragmatic about the whole affair.

“I don't think she's bothered at all,” de la Tour says. “She's very straight-talking, but I don't think she has any prejudice. You know, I don't think she's making any moral stands. She wouldn't — actually, she criticizes people who make moral stands. His wife is likely someone who just wants a husband. There are lots of wives like that. But I think [Totty] has a very full life.”

Griffiths agrees. “The wife probably subliminally looks at it as being somebody who's undemanding, so that she can just have her life and her husband and all the things that go with that, which is basically about social status and being taken seriously, sadly. Whereas she wouldn't be if she was a single woman. People get like that — look at Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, the ‘games people play.'”

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