KEY POINTS:
Who: British writer Alan Bennett
What: The History Boys, now screening
And: Untold Stories (Faber and Faber, $60)
For a man who didn't start writing prose until his mid-50s, Alan Bennett makes a fearfully good job of it. Untold Stories, his second collection of essays, autobiographical reminiscences and diaries, shows the same spare, clear and deceptively easy style that distinguished its 1994 predecessor, Writing Home.
The man who wrote of Philip Larkin that he writes "with a determined ordinariness that does not exclude (and often underpins) the lyrical" might well have been writing about himself. And when he takes my phone call in his Camden Town home, I suggest as much to him.
"I suppose so," he says. "Oscar Wilde said that criticism is a form of autobiography. Most of the writing I did before Writing Home was dialogue for plays and I still find descriptive writing very hard.
"Writing for the stage teaches you to make it as terse as possible, achieve your effects as concisely as possible, because there isn't the time to hang around, and that's a benefit just generally in prose writing."
As the title suggests, Untold Stories involves revelations, though much of the material between the covers had been revealed to him.
His piercingly moving account of his mother's early descent into dementia when Bennett was in his 30s, and "the long twilight" that the rest of her life became, includes his discovery that her father, his grandfather, had taken his own life.
"They were stories that hadn't been told, but they were also stories that I hadn't been told."
He wrote much of the book after being diagnosed with bowel cancer which unexpectedly went into remission. The book's intimate tone is perhaps explained by the fact that he was expecting it to be published posthumously.
"The personal stuff was the important stuff because I thought if I didn't write about it nobody would. There had been a pretty bad unauthorised biography [Backing into the Limelight by Alexander Games in 2001] and I thought I should tell the story as it seemed to me rather than as it seemed to somebody else."
The cancer scare is covered in the book (An Average Rock Bun takes its title from the doctor's description of the tumour's size), and so is a 1992 assault he suffered when he and his partner, the journalist Rupert Thomas, were taking an evening stroll in Ladispoli, a small seaside town near Rome.
That story (A Common Assault) is remarkable less for his relatively minor injuries than for the reaction by the local cops.
They assumed, since it took place in a gay-cruising area, that "on that seedy promenade some advance had been made, a gesture even, and the honour of the Italian male impugned. The wound I have received is virtually self-inflicted, an entirely proper response to an insult to Italian manhood."
The tabloids lapped it up, of course. "They're always doing that. They 'disclose' stuff and then they forget they have already disclosed it and they disclose it again."
And although Bennett has never made any secret of his sexuality, he has always wanted to avoid being labelled "a gay playwright".
"I want to live in a world where being gay is just taken for granted. That would be a civilised world. It's not of marginal interest but it's not the central fact about my life. The central fact about my life is that I write."
Bennett, who will be 73 in May, came to instant prominence in 1960 as a member of the comedy revue Beyond the Fringe with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller.
The sensation of that year's Edinburgh Festival, they went on to London and New York. Legends were born. But Bennett, always a reluctant performer, turned to writing. Since 1968, he has written stage plays (Habeas Corpus, A Question of Attribution, The Madness of George III), television drama (including the groundbreaking Talking Heads monologues) and film scripts (A Private Function, Prick Up Your Ears) that have put him at the forefront of the century's English-language dramatists.
His latest play, The History Boys, won buckets of awards in the West End and on Broadway before a world tour (which included instant sellout performances in the International Festival of the Arts in Wellington last summer). The film version, with the same cast and director, opens on February 25.
Set in a fictionalised Sheffield grammar school in the 1980s, it concentrates on a group of eight history students.
They are being groomed for the entrance examinations for Oxford and Cambridge by two radically different teachers: the ageing, discursive Hector (Richard Griffiths) who wants to fire the boys' love of learning, and the lean and hungry new graduate Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore) who wants to teach them strategies and techniques to grab examiners' attention.
It's a belter of a play which, in the unabashed staginess of its film version, maintains all the intensity of the theatrical experience.
And, like the best stories, it is about much more: layers keep opening on questions of integrity, power, progress, sexuality, class and social justice.
The story starts from a nugget of Bennett's own experience, though those who think they spot his likeness in the octet of young men are mistaken. He says the idea about a charismatic teacher germinated for half a century, although the play was written quite quickly. And he believes the success of the live production is a result of its universal relevance.
"The last thing I thought I had written was a play for all the family. I think of my public as people in late middle-age, but what happened was that parents brought their children and the grandparents too, and it seemed to say something to all of them about how education had become examinations and the questions of how much was sleight of hand and strategy and how much was genuine knowledge were questions that they all had to face.
"The parents will be on the side of the Irwins of this world, wanting their kids to get through the exam while at the same time sentimentally wishing they had a teacher like Hector, who was educated and polite.
"So with all these conflicting cross-currents, maybe it was relevant to three or four generations in a way that other plays I've written weren't."
But if The History Boys unerringly fingers one of the chief malaises of modern education, there is a much more transgressive idea at work in the play. Hector, a flamboyant, corpulent dandy who quotes poetry with Rumpolean flair and has the boys stage bawdy sex farces in French, is fond of feeling them up.
There is something sweet, sad and slightly pathetic about the way he does so but it is an idea strikingly at odds with the contemporary zeitgeist in which we are only beginning to emerge from a moral panic about the dangers adults pose to children.
Bennett says the ideas he is exploring came from the French-born American critic George Steiner's Lessons of the Masters. It's from Steiner that he takes one of the play's best lines when Hector says that "the transmission of knowledge is in itself an erotic act".
"When I started writing Hector I didn't know he was going to interfere with the boys but it just seemed to me as I wrote him that that was the kind of thing he would do. But they are more knowing and sophisticated than he is; he is in a way the innocent one.
"It's interesting from a playwright's point of view, because you face the challenge of making the audience sympathise with a character who's doing something entirely opposed to what they know to be right.
"I'm not sure that it is transgressive for young people. The boys take it with a pinch of salt. When I was at school if you got touched up by the vicar or something like that you didn't feel traumatised; you felt it was a bore.
"I got occasional outraged letters but somehow you got so involved in the characters you entered into their lives and took their point of view. They weren't victims. Their liveliness and vitality overflows and that's what intoxicates people."
Bennett says a play takes him about three years to gestate and write and he's not talking about his new one. "I'm in the middle bit of the three years, where I am not getting anywhere and I'm rather irritable. I've been through it before but you always forget. It's like childbirth. You don't remember. So I'll soldier on."
