Last week’s production at Oxford Playhouse of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys supplied compelling evidence of the strength of student drama here at present. Performances all round (under director James Lorenz) were confident and charismatic, with never a muffed line and a clarity of diction that many professionals sometimes fail to achieve both on the stage and (as the recent Jamaica Inn debacle on BBC1 demonstrated) in the television studio.

A hugely important contribution to the success of the enterprise was made by the designers, Nathan Stazicker, a first-year student, reading the history of art, and his Christ Church colleague (reading PPE) Rosie Thomas. I stress this because the set’s creators and illuminators (this time Samuel Littley) are so often overlooked by reviewers (mea culpa). Nathan and Rosie’s presentation of a large-classroom at Sheffield’s Cutler’s Grammar in the early 1980s was faultless. The unforgiving fluorescent tubes above the action were a particularly felicitous touch.

An added dimension to the entertainment arose from the fact that the young actors — playing sixth formers aspiring to Oxbridge entry — were showing themselves as they might have been a year or two ago at their schools. It was an excellent ‘in joke’, for instance, to hear them being told by one of their teachers to play down at interview their enthusiasm for time-wasting theatre.

Sport, on the other hand, is shown in the play to be a subject that can in certain circumstances profitably be raised. It is one of Bennett’s cheekiest libels on Oxford to have a coveted place at Christ Church awarded to the doltish Rudge (the excellent Frazer Hembrow here), who famously defines history as “one f***in’ thing after another”. His recruitment is presented as a double bonus for the House: not only will he be a very useful member of various of its sporting teams but he will also demonstrate, being the son of a former scout there, how this once-elitist institution now reaches out to embrace the masses.

With so much to enjoy in the offering from Pluto Productions, I hesitate to mention what has, for me, always been a serious stumbling block to full approval of the play (though clearly not for all those people who in a recent poll conducted by English Touring Theatre voted it the nation’s favourite).

This comes in the pupils’ easy tolerance of the crotch-groping antics of their inspirational teacher, Hector, brilliantly played last week by post-graduate Benedict Morrison (above). This seemed, as ever, distinctly unlikely to me, as indeed did his modus operandi in performing his assaults on a speeding motorbike with his victim on the pillion.

Bennett goes some way towards seeming to condone master/pupil relationships by showing us hetero heartthrob Dakin (Tommy Siman) eager for sex with another master and that man Irwin (Harley Viveash) — a popular historian and politician to be — proving not unwilling to oblige him. Meanwhile, the objections to Hector’s gay goings-on by the headmaster (Barnaby Fishwick) are presented as the attitude of a preposterous prig.

All this looked wrong when the play was written 10 years ago. It looks positively perverse today when so much is steadily emerging about sexual offending in schools.

Returning from a matinee performance of The History Boys, I opened The Times and read new revelations about abuse — dare I call it historic abuse? — at St Paul’s School.