Pulled by the persisting applause, this bedraggled band of brothers—including one conspicuous sister—stumbled timidly into their regular curtain-call reformation and bowed deeply to the demands of the euphoric mob, an unbroken line of ear-to-ear grins.

“At first, I thought the people were trying too hard to be nice,” admitted Richard Griffiths, who lords majestically over the boys (and Alan Bennett’s beautiful play) as their mentor, Hector. “But I listened harder to see what was going on. I listen, really sharply, all the time to the audience. The audience controls what happens in the show.

“The applause—it was really extraordinary so I said to them, ‘Do you want to go back?’ It was all a bit of an amateur shambles because we hadn’t prepared anything. We just wandered back on. I think the audience could see it wasn’t a trick to hold them around. We went back out because they wouldn’t stop applauding. It was as simple as that.”

Griffiths, with his XXL talent and waistline, has already picked off the Olivier and Evening Standard Awards over there and is the odds-on favorite for all the Best Actor prizes over here (save for the Outer Critics Circle which, oddly, nominated him for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play). And, looking beyond the stage, it’s entirely possible that he could to win, for the same performance, the Tony and the Oscar, since Hytner assembled the original cast for a cinematic runthrough which will be reaching theatre scenes in England in the fall and here before year’s end.

That’s the best-case scenario. The worst-case is that The History Boys at last brings to the fore a first-class, singularly unique character actor who has been loitering too long in the background of films and English plays. This is his first Broadway outing, as it is with every manjack in the cast, and he has already picked out his second: Heroes, Tom Stoppard’s adaptation of Gerald Sibleyras’ French play, which he did to Olivier Award-nominated effect opposite John Hurt and Ken Scott. “I’m keen on doing it here.”

It’s a face full of jowl, joy and comic inquisitiveness, and it’s finally coming into focus for the masses who only know him as movie uncles—the kinky Uncle Monty of "Withnail and I" and the cranky Uncle Vernon in the "Harry Potter" films. Only "Volpone" approaches the pleasure he got on stage from Hector—but “that was 20 years ago. Hector I’ll have spent three years with by the time the run finishes. I think that’ll be enough for me and Hector.”

Inevitably, Hector sends off reverberations in the audience of teachers, long gone, who mattered and made a difference. He strikes such a chord with Bill Rosenfield, the original cast album producer now based in London, who came over for the American opening. “It’s my seventh time seeing this,” he admitted, “and the first time I haven’t had to pay—so you know I like it. They’ve trimmed it down about 20 minutes, but, if you hadn’t seen the show before, you’d never know it. It’s traveled beautifully. The first time I saw it, when it was over, my partner turned to me and said, ‘If we sit here long enough, will they come out and do more?’ That’s what it is. It’s a wonderful play, impeccably performed. In fact, easily, it is the best evening in the theatre you could have this season.”

Bennett, who hit Broadway in ‘60 as one-fourth of Beyond the Fringe (along with Dudley Moore, Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller), looks, at 71, like the English dons he writes about—prim, precise and professorial. “I know,” he instantly acquiesces, with a faint smile.

At the heart of The History Boys is an academic argument, personified by the push-pull battle between the old-guard Hector who expounds a free-wheeling curriculum that prescribes “life lessons” for his charges (“sixth-formers,” or, in this country, high-school seniors) and a young newcomer named Tom Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore) who trains them in the glib tricks of the trade that’ll get them through the entrance tests ahead and into the privileged schools of Oxford and Cambridge. The hard-nosed headmaster (Clive Merrison) finds Hector’s “general studies” a little general for his tastes and recruits Irwin to get results by focusing the boys on the straight and narrow. The conflict comes down to Unstructured Enlightenment vs. Empty Noise that signifies nothing but gets the job done, and truth be damned.

“I don’t think that’s ever going to be resolved,” Bennett confessed about the raging war for young minds that goes on in the play. “I think we’ll always debate whether education is something for life or whether it’s for college qualifications. Everybody wants their children to have well-rounded educations, but they also want them to get through exams.”

You might think there is a Jean Brodie or Mr. Chips in Bennett’s past that would have inspired him to write this play, but he says not. “I think that’s probably why I wrote the play—because I didn’t have a teacher like that.”

Incredibly, if not criminally, this is Bennett’s first time back on Broadway since Habeas Corpus, which—with a glittering cast like Donald Sinden, Rachel Roberts, Celeste Holm, June Havoc, Richard Gere, Paxton Whitehead and Kristoffer Tabori —could limp through only 95 performances in 1975.

He still harbors hopes Broadway will find a spot for his The Lady in the Van, which he based on his real-life brush with a vagrant parked in front of his home; two actors played him, and Maggie Smith mopped up the floor with both of them, according to reliable reviews. “Maggie said she’d do it on Broadway if I’d do it, but I don’t think I could do that.” All is not lost, he added brightly: “Joan Rivers says she wants to do it.”

Bennett plays have made it over here, however—albeit to BAM and Off-Broadway. Minetta Lane housed his Talking Heads, a two-evening event with three monologues each—and somehow it won an Outstanding Ensemble Award from the aforementioned Outer Critics Circle (despite the slight fact no two performers appeared on the stage at the same time).

The Madness of George III , which rated a Broadway run as the last great hurrah for Nigel Hawthorne, got only as far as the Brooklyn Academy of Music, but director Hytner put together a film version (retitled, so no one got lost, "The Madness of King George") that won Oscar nominations for Bennett, Hawthorne and Helen Mirren and the prize for sets.