IT’S testimony to the British talent for hypocrisy that the very same people who would heartily approve of the current hue and cry over ‘historic’ offences laughed like drains at the child abuse portrayed in this relentlessly grubby play.

For some strange reason, the sight of men in authority beating and fiddling with schoolboys or touching up their secretaries constitutes the very latest in cutting edge humour in Malvern.

And if that’s not excruciating enough, we had to also endure the audience giggling like children whenever Alan Bennett’s strategically placed First Division swear words were delivered with a gravitas normally reserved for the words of Shakespeare.

These are rolled around in the mouth like tuck shop gobstoppers with all the relish that goes with recent discovery. Yes, we’ve all been there.

Bennett looks like a superannuated schoolboy himself but my feeling was that this was not so much a cathartic exercise rather a fantasy trip down memory lane.

Hector (Richard Hope) is vaguely recognisable as your standard public school pompous git of a teacher but then he goes and spoils the image with his improbable liking for boys in blazers.

Meanwhile, Dakin (Kedar Williams-Stirling) gets the hetero vote after announcing that he’s enjoying extra-curricular studies with the stereotypical tart of a school secretary that anyone who’s ever been to school knows never exists in real life.

But then he goes and ruins it when he makes a completely unconvincing pass at Irwin (Mark Field), a gratuitously offensive scene that lasts far too long as Dakin constantly repeats the nature of his request.

But worst of all, it’s impossible to form any connections whatsoever about any of these characters. Even the tragedy of a motorcycle crash leaves you with that ‘so what’ feeling.

The trouble with this is that good theatre must not only reach you on some personal level but above all should be about truth. The History Boys - although brilliantly acted - achieves neither, wallowing in its own cleverness and self-congratulation.

It runs until Saturday (July 4).