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 a 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.

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". 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."