Alan Bennett's The History Boys is a funny, perceptive and compassionate play about schooling and social class and sexuality and ambition in an English boys' school of the 1980s. There a group of high-achieving students are being groomed for what is seen as the ultimate; a shot at Oxford or Cambridge. They have as one of their teachers the wonderfully eccentric Mr Hector (Chris Baldock) and as another the no-nonsense Mrs Lintott (Alice Ferguson) but the ambitious headmaster (Geoffrey Borny) decides they need more and brings in young Mr Irwin (Hayden Splitt) to tutor them in the tactics needed to win an Oxbridge place.

Lintott may ground the students thoroughly in history but it's Hector who is running a dangerous class full of poetry and heavy with quotation and acting. He's also prone to inviting them to motorbike rides that involve sexual attentions. That will eventually put both the classes and his career at risk.

The choice to do the show in the round mostly pays off and a cunning use of reseating in the classroom scenes means the view is not always the same. The moments at the end where the characters say what has become of them do need a little more specific visibility. Bennett's play makes us care about their fates.

The boys in this production are an accurately varied lot. Some of the subtleties of accent and class may be a little blurred but there's a convincing picture of the energies of a classroom full of the competitive and the intelligent.

Some roles are more developed than others in the script but there are strong players proving that there's no such thing as a small part and the ensemble is much the better for their generosity.

Patrick Mandziy's manipulative student Dakin is a cynical force eventually for some kind of good. As the teacher who will show the boys how to impress the examiners Splitt has the right kind of nervous knowledgeable energy and innocence. Ferguson's Mrs Lintott is the exasperated lone female voice of reason and Borny absolutely nails the repellent headmaster.

Baldock's Hector catches the idealism and the tragedy of the teacher at the centre of classes where Noel Coward, Gracie Fields, James Mason and William Shakespeare jostle for the students' attention and consideration.

But it's Henry Strand's young Posner, figuring out his sexual identity, yearning for the unobtainable and always remembering Hector's classes, who haunts the end of the play.

Co-directors Chris Zuber and Jarrad West have come up with a fine production that catches both the tragedy and the comedy of the piece. Go and see it.