The History Boys Wyvern Theatre Until Saturday, June 6 THEY say school days are the best days of your life and if you were a pupil in Alan Bennett's History Boys you could imagine that that might well be true.

The drama, made into a hugely succesful film in 2006 and last year voted the nation's favourite play, charts the progress of a group of (mostly) intellectually superior pupils at a public boys' school as they prepare for their Oxbridge entrance exams.

Singing, dancing, pranks, rigorous intellectual debates and a passion for poetry run alongside burgeoning sexuality and hopes and fears for the future.

Bennett doesn't just look at the importance history and what can be learnt from it but at the education system itself and what can and can't be learnt from that. As Hector, the ribald, larger than life school master, says, education can be the enemy of education.

Hector, nearing the end of his career, and with a habit of inappropriate behaviour with pupils, fights to give the boys a rounded education while newcomer Irwin is determined to groom them into passing their exams. Which approach is right is a central theme to the play.

Whatever politicans do to our education system, it is a rite of passage all of us must pass through and nearly all of us have memories of that special teacher who inspired us and had a profound effect on our lives and the choices we made on leaving school.

Sell A Door Theatre Company's production is vibrant, punctuated with appropriate bursts of songs from the 1980s, when the play is set - Wild Boys, Should I Stay Or Should I Go, Temptation - and boasts some fine performances from all involved, notably Richard Hope as Hector and Steven Roberts as Posner.

A play to make you laugh, cry and think. - Gill Harris