Fully six years after Alan Bennett’s The History Boys opened to huge acclaim at the National Theatre, a professional production is at last being seen in Oxford, a city of central significance in the plot. The welcome revival, directed by Christopher Luscombe, confirms the play’s status as a classic, containing much that is true, much that is touching, much of what needed to be said.

The history boys are, in the primary sense of the words, the eight appealing young men whose efforts to win Oxbridge places are chronicled in the play. Its setting — well realised by Janet Bird in designs based around a revolving rank of desks — is a northern grammar school in the early 1980s.

The action clearly reflects the writer’s experiences at an academy of a similar sort 30 years earlier. Two of the pupils — the gay wit Posner (affectingly played by the sweet-voiced James Byng) and the droll churchgoer Scripps (Rob Delaney) — would seem to have much in common with their creator as he was in his schooldays.

The history boys are also — as Bennett makes clear in Untold Stories — TV dons of the smart-Alec Niall Ferguson variety. A sneer is never far away as they turn conventional wisdom on its head for effect. Such is the examination technique urged upon the eight candidates by fresh-from-Oxford Mr Irwin (Ben Lambert). “Grow a moustache,” advises the blimpish headmaster (Thomas Wheatley), believing the extra authority this would gain him could help the lads to success and, through it, to greater glory for the school. Irwin, we later discover, eventually embraces the career of telly pundit.

A teacher in entirely different mould — one who inspires with love of learning for its own sake — is presented in the careworn but still committed English and general studies master, Hector This is the play’s most famous role, memorably created by Richard Griffiths in whose sizeable shadow subsequent Hectors have felt it wise to follow — as Gerard Murphy does here.

It is lucky for his pupils — and for audiences privileged to enter the classroom with them — that Hector interprets general studies widely enough to permit the acting out of activities in a French brothel, with the lingo in place but clothing not. Quick thinking is necessary when the head arrives to find class dreamboat Dakin (Kyle Redmond-Jones) stripped to his underpants with a colleague about to administer — what? First aid, declares Hector quickly and firmly, for this is a First World War military hospital.

Hector’s lubricious groping of pupils unwise enough to ride pillion on his motor bike remains for me as unlikely as the boys’ benign acceptance of it — as, indeed, does the tolerance of the whole class to the gay goings on around them. These are the 1980s, after all.

It is unfortunate, too, perhaps that the gay Posner should emerge as the play’s truly tragic figure. He says: “I’m a Jew, I’m homosexual, I’m small and I live in Sheffield. I’m f****d.” As we later discover, he truly is.

Until Saturday. Box office: 01865 305305 (www.oxfordplayhouse.com).