Humble Boy

Shakespeare’s Hamlet, bee keeping, the ‘theory of everything,’ adultery and dysfunctional families are all themes present in Charlotte Jones’ London award-winner Humble Boy, which also contains echoes of Stoppard and Ayckbourn. It’s almost too many big ideas for this essential comedy-of-manners, which seems to run out of steam midway through the second-act.

Felix Humble, a late-thirties Cambridge physicist, returns to his family home in the Cotswolds following the death of his bee-keeper father, to discover his mother has removed the bees and is about to marry her lover. But his mother’s adulterous past is not the only secret revealed; throw in an unknown child he sired to a former girlfriend and the situation is ripe for family meltdown. Jones juggles the scenario using a running gag of the dead father’s ashes, and the ghost of the father (a la Hamlet) as the gardener who is only seen by Felix until the final scene when the mother sees him as well.

Top marks to Gary O’Neill’s production and cast who kept the play buoyant and repeatedly mined the dark humour. Felix is the role of the play and Jason Nash brought believability and truth to the sometime-stutterer and socially awkward character whose world revolves around physics. Beverley Wood’s vain and self-centred mother Flora bristled with acid throughout but nicely captured the vulnerability of the woman at the finale. Flora’s rustic lover George gave John Grey a chance to be marvellously crass and vulgar, Katie Dowling’s Rosie, the former girlfriend, had spunk, Brian Cannon’s ‘ghost’ pottered amiably, while Penny Murphy as the loyal neighbour Mercy made more than a meal of her before we eat grace.

The garden set was evocative and well-dressed and the use of Rimsky Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumble Bee” nicely set-the-scene and underscored the action.

Peter Pinne

Photographer: Dan Ryan