Leonard Quart: The joy of foreign interlopers on Broadway

Why would a play such as Alan Bennett's The History Boys snare six Tonys, including one for best play at this week's Broadway awards ceremony? Yes, it is an extremely well-acted, staged, and constructed, smart and wittily wry play. But the setting - a grammar school in northern England during the 1980s where eight boys are being taught by teachers with profoundly different and conflicting educational philosophies to get into Oxbridge - should, one would imagine, be too insular to translate successfully for American audiences.

True, the educational problem at the heart of the play poses a question with a larger and possibly universal meaning. What is the goal of an education for students aspiring to enter the elite? Does the kind of test-oriented education that educates students to win places in a country's most prestigious universities come at a cost of never developing a capacity to live a fully realised life? This is a dilemma that American upper-middle class parents - the Broadway audience - with their children being trained to do well on college board tests know only too well.

The History Boys is also a highbrow, intellectually-bracing play that is also accessible and entertaining. It grants Broadway audiences the chance to feel sophisticated and smart without making them struggle with formal experimentation or contemplate the bleakness of the human condition without the consolation of humour and warmth. The play may have a scene in French, and snatches of poetry interspersed in the dialogue, but it never befuddles or eludes the audience's grasp.

The History Boys offers an alternative to all the elaborately-staged, special effects dominating musicals, such asPhantom of the Opera and Chicago, which are Broadway staples that seem set to play forever. And additionally, there is the urbane allure of British accents which bestow success on every middlebrow trifle that stars Dame Judi Dench. For these audiences British means classy and refined, and this often allows mediocre productions to reap undeserved critical applause.

It is almost impossible to mount serious drama on Broadway - the costs are too high, and audiences dominated by tourists, theatre parties, and businessmen on expense accounts want diversion, not plays that challenge them emotionally and intellectually. They want to be passive and put their souls and minds at rest in the theatre; they do not want to be confronted with a drama that may disrupt their way of seeing or dealing with the world. There is nothing inherently wrong with theatre that provides pure entertainment and escape, but when that is all that is on offer, something profound has been lost.

These demands make it difficult to produce serious political plays, or plays that eschew realism for expressionism and turn colloquial speech into stylised dialogue. The late great African-American playwright, August Wilson's lyrical and imaginative plays usually suffered from short runs on Broadway. In fact, unless a film star, such as Julia Roberts or Al Pacino, decides to grace the Broadway stage, you have to go to off Broadway or off-off Broadway to find serious drama. And even off Times Square one of the best works I saw recently, was the British playwright David Hare's Stuff Happens.

It is interesting to note that two of The History Boys' competitors for the Tony for best drama were Irish plays: The Lieutenant of Inishmore, Martin McDonagh's comic splatterfest about a mad Irish terrorist, and Shining City, Conor McPherson's play about repressed, disconnected people set in present-day Dublin. Is it possible that Broadway audiences won't attend serious plays written by American playwrights, but find Irish and English dramatists worthy of embracing?

I have no ready answer to that question, but I know Alan Bennett's play was greeted on Broadway with superlatives that embarrassed even its director, Nicholas Hytner. When it opened, The New York Times said Bennett's play has a "seductive polish that New York audiences have seldom experienced of late", and the Los Angeles Times enthused over Richard Griffiths's "wondrous" performance as the inspirational teacher Hector. Hytner's response was when "critics go nuts they reach for a glossary of superlatives that are not on the shelves of English critics. I prefer it that our critics are more reserved."

The History Boys may not be a great play, but it is a very good one. And on Broadway, which sometimes feels like an artistic desert, dominated by rank commercialism, a clever, well-written play, containing brilliant performances, and provoking the audience to think, is a precious thing.

The writer is a New York-based film critic and newspaper columnist