Character Analysis
Hector: Passion and Abuse
Hector is the play’s most complex character. He is a brilliant, passionate teacher whose general studies lessons — filled with poetry, film, and song — transform the boys’ intellectual lives. His quotation “The best moments in reading are when you come across something — a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things — which you had thought special and particular to you” captures his belief that literature creates private, almost sacred connections. He is loved by the boys, who describe him as “the best teacher we ever had.”
But Hector is also an abuser. He touches boys inappropriately on his motorbike, and the boys have normalised this: they draw straws for who rides with him and treat it as a joke. Bennett refuses to separate Hector’s brilliance from his moral failure. The audience is denied the comfort of a simple judgement. Hector’s name itself is significant: the Trojan hero Hector was a great warrior who was ultimately destroyed. Like his namesake, this Hector is admirable and doomed, his greatness inseparable from his downfall.
Hector embodies Bennett’s central moral complexity: he is simultaneously the play’s greatest teacher and its most morally compromised adult. His teaching enriches the boys’ lives; his abuse exploits them. Bennett insists that both truths coexist.
Irwin: Performance and Concealment
Irwin is a young, recently graduated supply teacher whose every action is a performance. He teaches the boys to argue against the obvious — “Find a proposition, invert it, then look around for proofs” — and to be intellectually provocative. His method works — the boys are stimulated, and they get into Oxbridge. But Irwin never reveals what he actually believes. His teaching is all surface: technique without substance, cleverness without conviction.
Irwin is also closeted. He is attracted to Dakin but cannot act on it openly. When Dakin propositions him, Irwin hesitates, then agrees — but the motorbike crash intervenes before anything happens. Bennett draws a parallel between Irwin’s intellectual and sexual dishonesty: he performs heterosexuality just as he performs historical argument. In the epilogue, Irwin becomes a television historian — the ultimate career for a man who values performance over truth. His wheelchair, the result of the crash, literalises his diminishment.
The Headmaster is the play’s flattest character — deliberately so. He is a philistine who sees Oxbridge places as “trophies” and education as a “service.” His language is relentlessly corporate: “results,” “shelf,” “display,” “selling points.” He cannot understand what Hector teaches because he cannot measure it. Bennett uses him as a satirical portrait of Thatcherite education: schools as businesses, students as products, learning as a means to a league-table position.
The Headmaster is also morally bankrupt. He knows about Hector’s behaviour (“the odd grope”) and does nothing until it becomes publicly embarrassing. He then exploits the situation to sack a teacher he has always resented. His concern is institutional reputation, not child protection. Bennett makes the audience realise that the Headmaster’s utilitarian values are not just intellectually wrong but morally dangerous: when education is only about results, the wellbeing of students becomes expendable.
Posner: The Outsider
Posner is the most vulnerable of the boys. He is Jewish, gay, small, and acutely self-aware. His devotion to Hector is genuine — Hector’s poetry lessons give Posner a language for feelings he cannot otherwise express. His singing of “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” is addressed to Dakin, whom he loves hopelessly. It is one of the play’s most poignant moments: a boy using Hector’s cultural education to articulate unrequited love.
The epilogue reveals that Posner ends up lonely and mentally fragile. Of all the boys, he is the one education fails most completely. Hector’s teaching enriched him emotionally, but it could not protect him from the world. Irwin’s teaching gave him interview skills, but not resilience. Posner represents the human cost of treating education as either a game (Irwin) or a beautiful abstraction (Hector) — neither approach addressed his real needs.
Posner is Jewish, gay, small, and desperately in love with Dakin. He is the character most deeply affected by both teachers: he treasures Hector’s poetry and is wounded by Irwin’s Holocaust debate. His lonely adult life in the epilogue is the play’s most devastating judgement on an education system that failed its most vulnerable student.
Dakin, Mrs Lintott, and Scripps
Dakin is the alpha of the group: confident, sexually self-assured, and strategically intelligent. He propositions Irwin, exercising power over a teacher through sexual attraction. He also has a sexual relationship with Fiona, the Headmaster’s secretary, and treats both relationships with the same casual entitlement. Dakin represents the boy who absorbs Irwin’s performativity most completely — he becomes a tax lawyer, successful but intellectually empty. His military metaphors for sex — Fiona is “my Western Front” — reveal that Dakin sees human relationships as ground to be taken.
Mrs Lintott is the boys’ regular history teacher, competent and marginalised. She taught them the A-level content that earned the results, but receives no credit — it is Irwin and Hector who are seen as the “real” teachers. Her line “History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men” is both a feminist observation and a dry joke. She sees through the men’s posturing, and describes her own role as being “confided in by all parties”. Bennett uses Mrs Lintott to expose the play’s (and the education system’s) structural sexism.
Scripps is the group’s moral compass. He keeps a diary, questions both teachers’ methods, and becomes a journalist. He is the boy who asks: “How do you define history?” and who worries about truth when Irwin dismisses it. In the epilogue, Scripps has perhaps the most balanced adult life, suggesting that his critical distance from both teachers served him well.
Mrs Lintott’s speech about the absence of women from history (“History is women following behind with the bucket”) is one of the play’s most significant moments. She points out that the Oxbridge debate between Hector and Irwin is itself gendered: two men arguing about how to teach a group of boys, while the woman who did the real work is invisible. Her observation that “history is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men” redefines the word “history” — it becomes both the academic discipline and the ongoing story of male failure.
Bennett does not idealise Mrs Lintott: she is sharp but resigned, aware of her marginalisation but unable to change it. Her position echoes the broader feminist critique that women in education are often the foundation on which male reputations are built. In the 1980s setting, this would have been even more pronounced.