Forty Years On (play)

Forty Years On is a 1968 play by Alan Bennett. It was his first West End play.

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. The play within the play is about the changes that had happened to the country following the end of the Great War in 1918 and the loss of innocence and a generation of young men. In a 1999 study of Bennett's work, Peter Wolfe writes that the author calls the piece "part play, part revue"; Wolfe describes it as "nostalgic and astringent, elegiac and unsettling".

The play includes a satire on T. E. Lawrence; known as "Tee Hee Lawrence" because of his high-pitched, girlish giggle. "Clad in the magnificent white silk robes of an Arab prince ... he hoped to pass unnoticed through London. Alas he was mistaken." The section concludes with the headmaster confusing him with D. H. Lawrence.

Russell Harty, whom Bennett had become friends with at Exeter College, Oxford, was teaching English at Giggleswick School when the play was written. Harty was housemaster of Carr House and several of the schoolboys in the play had the surnames of boys in Carr House.

The first production of Forty Years On opened at the Apollo Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue on 31 October 1968, and was an immediate success. The school's headmaster was played by John Gielgud; Paul Eddington was Franklin and Alan Bennett played Tempest. The full cast was:

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