One word summarises the reason why "Humble Boy" is a first-class evening of theatre, and it is "skill." It scarcely needs saying, with so strong a cast, that the acting is brilliantly skilful; nor, given the usual high standard of London stagings, that the set design is consummate; nor that the music, the lighting, and every detail of the production is polished to a point above excellence. But above all the play itself – its writing, the conceptions it embodies, and the way it tells its story – is a quintessence of skill.
      This is so despite there being nothing original about the play or its theme. Charlotte Jones knows her Stoppard, her Hamlet, her Ayckbourne, and among other things perhaps the fourth book of Vergil's "Georgics" on the subject of Aristaeus's bees. In addition she has certainly done her homework among the science text-books, and she has learned how farce achieves its effects – and creates moments hilariously close to the grand tradition of slapstick so beloved of one segment of West End audiences. Out of these influences she has woven a recognisably contemporary West End "well-made play", but of the first rank; for it is cleverly crafted and beautifully written, and it has a poignant core, a theme which touches all lives sometime.
      That theme is the death of a husband-and-father, a modest teacher of biology passionate about bees; and of the coming-to-terms with this fact not just of the immediately bereaved family – Flora Humble his widow, and Felix Humble his son – but the widow's lover, George Pye, and his daughter Rosie, who once had her heart broken by Felix Humble, and who has a closer and continuing tie to him of which, at the play's outset, he has no knowledge. And at intervals throughout the play, but only (until the very end) when Felix is alone on the stage, Jim the gardener appears, to dispense a kind of oblique, laconic wisdom that keeps readjusting Felix's neurotic perspective on things, skewed by his inability to accept his father's death and the lifelong absence of his mother's love (Felicity Kendal plays the neglectful bitchy mother wonderfully) which torments him, and is a large part of the reason why he is a Cambridge physicist seeking "the mother of all theories" to unify and explain the world – and not least, in some curious way that Felix himself does not understand, how the improbable pairing of his parents occurred.
      The skilful weaving of parallels and analogies gives the play more depth than at first appears, and its orchestration of very funny and poignantly sad moments are unobtrusively cathartic. Simon Russell Beale is superb as Felix Humble – to say that the part seems as if written for him is just of course to say how wonderfully he plays it. Felicity Kendal is an excellent Flora, the beautifully preserved, bitchy, long-frustrated, reluctant and unmaternal mother who finds out something about her own feelings at last. Dennis Quilley is convincing and compelling as the self-made man who loves big band music, and Cathryn Bradshaw is enchanting as the irrepressible Rosie. In a tour-de-force of co-starring Marcia Warren provides some of the funniest and best-realised moments of the play, and deserves a medal.
AC Grayling