KEY POINTS:
Herald rating: * * * * *
If somebody should tell you that the screen version of Alan Bennett's multi-award-winning drama is too much like a stage play on film, take no notice. The comment is inane, a bit like observing that there is too much music in The Magic Flute.
The essence of the triumph of this production is that it exults in its theatricality. Hytner, who directed Bennett's The Madness of George III on stage and screen, allows the camera to move, but he doesn't make a big thing of it. He has made some cuts but he's smart enough to know he's not so much adapting the play as bringing it to a wider audience - and to posterity.
Set in a Sheffield grammar school in the 1980s, the play focuses on a group of eight history students being groomed for the Oxford and Cambridge entrance examinations by two radically different teachers: the ageing, discursive Hector (Griffiths), who wants to fire the boys' love of learning, and the lean and hungry new graduate Irwin (Moore), who seeks to teach them strategies and techniques to grab examiners' attention.
The tension between these two points of view is the source of the film's drama, and what's striking is that although Bennett set it in the Thatcherite 80s - the last time the Oxbridge exams were administered as he depicts them - it rings even truer now when societal and individual angst about education are at an even higher pitch.
But this is a play about much more than education. Bennett has fashioned a masterwork, the kind of drama that exhilarates as it confronts, opening out to reveal more and more hidden layers.
Along the way he fills the play with telling ironies, glancingly observed. It was not until I got home that I realised, for example, the significance of how Rudge, the lad least likely, makes it into university.
Yes, the language is stagey, but really it's just a size larger than life. It has an eerie, dramatising effect, the way the slightly outsize furniture in Shallow Grave kept us on edge, and the ensemble of boys, who function almost as a unit without ever losing their radiant individuality, do it proud.
The titanic Griffiths is a deliciously complicated character, at once irresistible and faintly pathetic, and Moore, ratlike and faintly panicky, perfectly embodies what two decades of "reform" have done to our civilisation.
Equal parts drama, comedy, mystery, satire and spoof, this is a cracker. Do not miss it.
Cast: Richard Griffiths, Frances de la Tour, Stephen Campbell Moore, Samuel Barnett, Dominic Cooper, James Corden, Jamie Parker, Russell Tovey, Samuel Anderson, Sacha Dhawan, Andrew Knott, Clive Merrison
Director: Nicholas Hytner
Running time: 112 mins
Rating: M
Screening: Lido, Academy, Berkeley Mission Bay
Verdict: A triumphant transition to the screen for a play that crackles with ideas and is full of food for thought
