Coquitlam actor Daniel Johnston didn’t get much of a break from school when he walked out of Capilano University’s theatre program in April.

Not even six months had gone by and the outgoing St. Thomas Moore grad was back in the classroom again — this time as the rebellious Lockwood in Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys, about a group of young lads competing for cap and gown at either Oxford or Cambridge.

Set in the years of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative England, The History Boys has the look and feel of a typical high school, complete with lockers and a sterile collection of metal desks and chairs. But the dilemmas facing the hormonally driven boys, and the dynamics between two rival teachers, is as messy and chaotic as a bar-room brawl.

Just like high school.

“It’s so dense and definitely exhausting. You have top be “on” for three hours,” says Johnston as he rounds out his first week in The History Boys at the Arts Club Granville Island Stage until Oct. 25.

For Johnston, whose Lockwood wears the 1980s staples of a skinny tie, basketball shoes painted day-glo orange and a mullet, History Boys was like school for another reason — among the cast were some great teachers.

Bernard Cuffling and Duncan Fraser filled out the roster of great names. Fraser, who plays the headmaster, is a highly-praised actor of national stature, and Cuffling is well known to Vancouver audiences for both comedic and dramatic roles. In The History Boys he displayed his skills in both and filled the hours of rehearsal with his anecdotes. “He loves to talk, you can sit and listen to him for hours,”Johnston recalled.

When he got the call to play Lockwood this summer, Johnston was thrilled. He’d seen the movie and read the play and knew he had landed in a spot of good luck. “When you get a hold of juicy fantastic material, it’s exciting. It’s kind of akin to something like Shakespeare.”

As a member of the supporting cast, Johnston didn’t have near as many lines as the lead boy, Dakin, a handsome but shallow charmer. But it was his job to give Lockwood a voice in the din.

“I was told be chipper, ‘you need more attitude.’”

Johnston plays Lockwood as a young man with a bit of a swagger who hides his secret yearning to get a first-class education and rise above his low-class origins.

The History Boys looks at how Thatcher’s “pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps Conservatism challenged the power of the declining elite, the rich whose inheritances and family seats insulated them from the worst of Britain’s economic troubles but who probably contributed to them with their complacency. Bennett gives equal treatment to the modern-day scramblers and cynics who disdain the arts and crunch numbers rather than study the classics but makes no final judgement. The audience is left to sort out the winners from the losers. Homosexuality gets a similar neutral — read non-hysterical — treatment.

While Bennett never resolves the debate between those who think school is the ticket to a job and those who think learning is an end in itself —he does force us to admit the value of school and learning.

Johnson agrees. Like Hector, whose compassion he admires, Johnson is a life-long student, too, and the time he spent on the stage of The History Boys has served him well.

“I found out” — the 23-year-old wryly notes — “how how little I know,”

• The History Boys by Alan Bennett is playing at the Granville Island Stage until Oct. 25.