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.
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.
At the time he wrote the play Alan Bennett was a friend of Russell Harty, whom he had known at Exeter College, Oxford. Harty, later a BBC talk-show host, was then teaching English at Giggleswick School. 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 and was an immediate success. The school's headmaster was played by John Gielgud; Paul Eddington was Franklin, Alan Bennett played Tempest, with Dorothy Reynolds, Nora Nicholson, Robert Swann and Allan Warren also in the cast. The play was directed by Patrick Garland and the musical director was Carl Davis. The young actors who played the twenty or so schoolboys included George Fenton, Peter Richardson and Anthony Andrews.
In the mid-1980s, Forty Years On was revived at Chichester Festival Theatre, with Paul Eddington now playing the role of the headmaster, John Fortune as Franklin, and Stephen Fry as Tempest.
Bennett himself played the headmaster in a BBC Radio 4 production in 1999.