There’s much to enjoy in this bright and breezy production of Alan Bennett’s most famous play, directed by Kate Sexton.

We’re in Cutler’s Grammar School, where a group of history pupils are preparing for the Oxford and Cambridge entrance examinations, never quite sure if it’s knowledge or ideas that will get them through.

Wolfblood‘s Kedar Williams-Stirling impresses as Dakin, the boy most likely to succeed, capitalising on his good looks, charm and a keen intelligence. He’s not gay, but cheerfully willing to experiment if it means being worshipped (or, at least, having adoring young men kneeling before him). He has an easy, winning charm that makes it easy to believe why he is a distraction for at least three characters in the play.

Elsewhere, Steven Roberts has fun with Posner, dealing out bon mots and show songs in equal measure, while managing to give weight to the play’s sudden moments of subdued melancholy. Mark Field’s Irwin is an Alan Bennett in amber, careful hair and sensible glasses, only passionate within the confines of the classroom.

The kids, incidentally, are equally passionate and engaged, never finding the time to pick on or bully anybody that would often be targets in a boys’ school; the gay kid, the black kid, Jewish and Muslim boys, amongst others. All are celebrated.

This, in short, is potentially the main challenge any audience will have in accepting The History Boys. The teenagers are too wise, too witty, too damn liberal to be truly considered realistic. It takes a moment to realise that it’ not meant to be: this is a nostalgia play, not necessarily for the schooldays that we had, but for the ones we hoped and wished for. Centring it all is the charismatic and eccentric Hector (Richard Hope) who is beloved of his pupils, all of whom tacitly allow his occasional fumblings in their nether regions.

Apart from a pumping soundtrack and the occasional cultural reference, there’s not really nothing to signify that this oasis of learning is any different is the fifties or the eighties. Each of the staff becomes keenly aware of this: Irwin seeks to upset the perceived wisdom of dusty old history (he would have been the one at your school suggesting the revolutionary idea that Kitchener, Churchill and even Henry V could be found guilty of war crimes).

Richard Hope’s Hector is the idealised romantic, the kind of teacher who values ideas over proof. Barely noticed is the headmaster (Christopher Ettridge), who ruefully acknowledges that his generation of idealists from the post war years hoped for change and settled for a quiet life. It’s left to Susan Twist’s Mrs Lintott to underline what the boys and men are struggling to learn, although Rudge (David Young) sums it up in what is the plays most iconic line.

In the end, then, lesson learned: not remotely realistic. But then, neither was Dead Poets Society (which is surely due a stage adaptation sometime soon). But, better, it is fiercely idealistic, and has something important to teach us, summed up in Hector’s final words.

Performed on Monday 9 February 2015 at Brighton Theatre Royal.

> Buy tickets at atgtickets.com/brighton or by phoning 0844 871 7650.

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