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Written
by
Charlotte Jones
Directed
by
John Caird
Designed
by
Tim Hatley
Flora
Humble
Felicity Kendal
Felix
Humble
Simon
Russell Beale
George
Pye
Denis Quilley
Mercy
Lott
Marcia Warren
Rosie
Pye
Cathryn
Bradshaw
Jim
William
Gaunt
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The
Gielgud Theatre
5
February - 30 Nov 2002 |
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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 |
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