Forty Years On (play)

Forty Years On is a 1968 play by Alan Bennett. It was his first West End play. It takes its name from the Harrow School song. The play is set in a British public school called Albion House ("Albion" is an ancient word for Britain), which is putting on an end of term play in front of the parents, i.e. the audience. A play within the play is a review of the first half of the 20th Century, made up of a series of vignettes. The scenes are linked by an ongoing conversation involving a Member of Parliament and his family that takes place during World War II, reflecting on what has passed.

The first vignette is a parody of Oscar Wilde. This is followed by an evocation of the Edwardian era, seen through people's too-rosy memories, including growing up and going to school at the time. There follows a spoof lantern-slide lecture on Lawrence of Arabia, "the man and the myth".

Bertrand Russell appears, as do Lady Ottoline Morrell and Osbert Sitwell. A memoir follows about a group of young aristocrats and intellectuals known at the time as The Coterie. This gives an ominous foreshadowing of the slaughter of World War I.^[1]

Leonard and Virginia Woolf appear in a spoof about the Bloomsbury Group which confuses Isaiah Berlin with Irving Berlin. A school confirmation class turns into awkward sex education. There is a parody of the adventure novels of John Buchan, "Sapper" and their kind, described as "the school of Snobbery with Violence".^[2] We see a mock trial of Neville Chamberlain over Munich. His sentence: "perpetual ignominy."

The play concludes with a moment of nostalgia for what was lost. "A sergeant's world it is now, the world of the lay-by and the civic improvement scheme." The school sing the closing hymn "All people that on earth do dwell."