Ivan Kyncl Jamie Parker, Dominic Cooper and James Corden star in Alan Bennett's excellent play "History Boys," at London's National Theatre through April 26. Click photo for larger image.

LONDON-- "The History Boys" is the best new play in London because it is deftly ambidextrous: a smart, allusive comedy about education and ambition, but also a feeling lament for the entropy of all things human. Combining comedy and the "not with a bang but a whimper" kind of apocalypse is a tough act to sustain, but Alan Bennett pulls it off with mature, compassionate playwriting that balances belly laughs with tragic regret.

"Best new play in London" is a weighty claim. But I make it happily, allowing only for these disclaimers, that it's already been running 10 months (is that still "new"?) and that I haven't seen everything in London, where new plays arrive every day.

But there's consensus support in that "History Boys" won the 2004 Olivier Award (London's Tony) for best new play, as well as Oliviers for director Nicholas Hytner and lead actor Richard Griffiths, while playwright Bennett won a lifetime achievement award. That gave it one more Olivier overall than the year's best musical, "The Producers."

"History Boys" is set in what the English call a grammar school -- a state-run high school into which the better students are channeled. The closest American analogy is to the special academic high schools that used to feature in the public school systems of many American cities.

It is set in the 1980s, when the Thatcher era had taught that capitalist greed was the engine of progress. The school is in the north of England, the old industrial rust belt, as the eight boys' varying accents make clear. They come from mixed ethnic backgrounds -- one Indian, one African, one Jewish, all of differing economic levels. But they are united by their brains and by being 17- and 18 year-old boys in their final year of a single-sex school, prepping to "go to university." A far more restricted goal than in America, they will be admitted to study specific subjects. Whatever their age, educationally they're already at the level of good American college sophomores about to specialize.

Through the school year of the play, the eight are being prepared for the rigorous written A-level exams which, together with interviews, sort out university hopefuls. The Headmaster is particularly ambitious to get some of them into Oxford or Cambridge, instead of the "red brick" universities such as Sheffield, Newcastle or Durham, where his best students have gone in the past. So he hires Irwin, a sharp young history teacher, to give the boys a more trendy polish than they've been getting from rigorous Mrs. Lintott and eccentrically imaginative Hector.

That's the conflict: A struggle for the souls of these evolving young men between education for the heart and education for success.

The play's hero, Hector, thinks exams are emblems of conformity and the enemy of education -- indeed, that "Education" is itself the enemy of education. He wants to set the boys free, especially in his general studies class, which he runs as a wide-ranging free-for-all, grilling them on words, having them memorize poetry or sing songs (whether art songs or Gracie Fields), deviating into French conversation and challenging them with a long-standing bet that they can't act out a scene from a classic movie he can't identify. His class is more about culture than education.

Hector's antagonist, Irwin, tells the boys their practice exam essays are correct but boring. The facts are true, they object (and they do know their history); "What's truth got to do with it?" he replies. "Be perverse, take the wrong end of the stick," he tells them -- exams are less about knowledge than the performance of knowledge.

Irwin's success ethic is offensive because it's manipulative, but he's no fool. For example, he points out that official "memorial days" purposefully promote a sentimental tale of sacrifice rather than let us question what (and whom, and whose property) the sacrifice was for. Thus "to commemorate" often means to forget.

This is just one of the play's ongoing arguments about the uses of the past and the difference between history and journalism. They are never simple. Nor is Irwin just evil. We can pity him. But we do see where his kind of success leads, in a prologue where he, as a government functionary, instructs members of parliament to support a new government bill curtailing personal liberties by using the specious argument that "the loss of liberty is the price we pay for freedom." (Sound familiar?) That's just the sort of paradoxical rationalization he teaches the boys. We also flash forward to see Irwin as the slick host of a TV miniseries, reinterpreting medieval history in an attention-grabbing way.

Teachers and boys cover lots of history, literature and pop culture, especially World War I and its poets. The Holocaust proves a particularly difficult case. Bennett creates some great comic scenes, such as a French conversation skit that has to change course 180 degrees when the Headmaster walks in, and some funny practice interviews.

Hector is one of those unforgettable teachers, inspirational but with unpredictable results. Irwin is either disingenuous or deeply meretricious (yes, they use words like this -- the play is about real ideas). But his offer of success is seductive. The real villain is the Headmaster, who seems just a bureaucratic joke until he exercises his power.

Meanwhile, since these are teenage boys, there's lots of talk about sex, including regular accounts of the charismatic Dakin's pursuit of the Headmaster's secretary. At least one of the boys is gay, with an unrequited passion for Dakin, and at least one of the teachers is also gay, with explosive results.

"History Boys" is directed with pace and feeling by Hytner, who said, when he won the Olivier, "Directing a new musical, now that's hard, that's really hard. This, by comparison, was indecently pleasurable." The set by star designer Bob Crowley mutates quickly to become Hector's classroom, faculty lounge, Headmaster's office or whatever. Scenes are linked with film clips showing the boys and teachers in the hallways or at play. The whole runs nearly three hours, but you wouldn't know it -- I didn't want it to end.

The eight boys are as true and natural an ensemble as any noisy gaggle of Central Catholic boys you might see horsing around on Fifth Avenue. Not all get equal emphasis, of course. Those who stand out are the smart, sexy Dakin (Dominic Cooper -- watch for him), sardonic Scripps (Jamie Parker), chubby class clown Timms (James Corden) and rueful Posner (Samuel Barnett, who was nominated for an Olivier).

Geoffrey Streatfield plays the enigmatic Irwin, and the excellent Frances de la Tour is Mrs. Lintott; it's not her fault that her plea for more attention to women in history (and History) feels like the play's one patch of special pleading. The play's star is the rotund, Olivier-winning Griffiths. His Hector is no saint, embodying all the ambiguity that Bennett packs into this wise and witty play.

At the National Theatre through April 26; expect a transfer thereafter and an American production someday.