Humble Boy

by Charlotte Jones

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre on 29 March 2018

Paul Miller directs this first London-based revival of Charlotte Jones's 2001 play, featuring Jonathan Broadbent as Felix Humble, Belinda Lang as his mother Flora Humble, Selina Cadell as Mercy Lott, Christopher Ravenscroft as Jim, Paul Bradley as George Pye and Rebekah Hinds as his daughter Rosie Pye. The production is designed by Simon Daw.

The play concerns Felix, a potentially brilliant astrophysicist, returning home for his father's funeral and being faced with his poisonous mother, now interested in marrying George Pye. Life is further complicated by the fact some seven years earlier, Felix had had an affair with George's daughter Rosie; only now does he discover that Rosie's seven year old daughter is named Felicity 'after his father'.

There are many resonances here with Hamlet - the contrast between Flora's past and future husbands, the son unable to relate successfully to people, preoccupied with more abstract problems. There are also resonances with The Winter's Tale - a powerful figure eaten up with negative emotions and damaging everyone in the vicinity (Leontes, transmuted to Flora), and a surprising possibility of renewal despite all the pain.

The play seems to be a social comedy, and there are some hilarious moments brought about by visual jokes, rough humour and appallingly wounding wit. But with these larger resonances hovering over the action, there is also a deeper movement giving rise to powerful emotions and a genuinely poignant conclusion. The characters, who seem at first to be stock types, develop in surprising ways, and the cast managed these developments extremely well.

Once again the central square acting space of the Orange Tree Theatre was beautifully transformed, this time into a summer garden in the Cotswolds, an apparently poisoned Eden in which nonetheless there was hope at the end. The play mixes surface brilliance with subtle and acute observations, and the production brought out all these aspects to great effect.