life lessons; Adam Green talks to Alan Bennett about his riveting new memoir and The History Boys, the play that could be his first American hit.

Byline: Adam Green

During his brief career as a medieval historian at Oxford, in the late fifties and early sixties, Alan Bennett once gave a lecture on Richard II, after which he asked the audience if it had any questions. "Could you tell me where you bought your shoes?" was the lone response. "It was shortly after this," Bennett writes in Untold Stories (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), his marvelous new collection of memoirs and essays, "I abandoned history and went on the stage."

Bennett's decision led him to join up with three other Oxbridge lads-Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook, and Dudley Moore-for Beyond the Fringe, an evening of anarchic sketch comedy that paved the way for Monty Python and its offspring. A West End hit, Beyond the Fringe moved to Broadway in 1962 and ran for almost three years, earning its creators a special Tony Award. Since then, Bennett has gone on to become one of England's finest playwrights-its diffident bard of gentle irony and humane satire-and an unofficial national treasure (he declined a knighthood in 1996).

But Bennett's dazzling body of work, a balancing act between laughter and heartbreak, remains underproduced on these shores: He hasn't had a play on Broadway since a short-lived production of his sex-and-death farce Habeas Corpus, in 1975. American audiences probably know Bennett best as the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of 1994's The Madness of King George and the author of Talking Heads, a series of wry, sharply etched monologues about lives of quiet desperation that have turned up from time to time on PBS. This month, that may change, with the American publication of Untold Stories, which is still on the UK best-seller lists, and the arrival

on Broadway of The History Boys, Bennett's sharply entertaining if very English look at education and its discontents, straight from a sold-out Olivier-winning run at the National Theatre.

With The History Boys, Bennett returns to the classroom setting of his first play, 1968's Forty Years On, a mock end-of-term pageant at a posh public school that both jeered at the follies of Old England and mourned its passing. Here, the action unfolds in a modest Yorkshire grammar school, closer to the one that Bennett actually attended in Leeds. He writes about that time with painful honesty and self-deprecating humor in Untold Stories, depicting himself as a shy, tormented youth, grappling with homosexuality, religious fervor, and a voice that didn't change until after his sixteenth birthday.

Staged with precision and brio by the National's director, Nicholas Hytner, a frequent Bennett collaborator, The History Boys features a smashing young cast of newcomers as bright, cheeky sixth-formers (high school seniors) preparing for their Oxbridge exams. They are a precocious, rambunctious lot, able to quote the poetry of Philip Larkin, re-create the dialogue from Now, Voyager, and improvise a ...