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If there is a
problem with Charlotte Jones' Humble Boy it is that she casts her net
perhaps a bit too wide.
We get to look
at a bit of everything from physics to astrology and from bees to sex. And
everywhere there seem to be echoes of Hamlet perhaps at their best when
there are chats with a ghostly gardener.
But if all
that makes it sound a bit dry, it very definitely isn't. The play is full
of gentle humour and is sometimes outrageously funny.
Such was the
play's importance that when it was first produced on the London stage -
and even later on tour when it came to the Theatre Royal, Bath - it had
some of the biggest names in the business starring in it.
For this Next
Stage production the company has brought out many of its key players who
stand up well even to the extremely close scrutiny of having the play
produced in the round.
The pivotal
figure in this drama of middle class life in the Cotswolds - as one
character puts it, these are the very people who give those living in the
country a bad name - is Felix Humble a stuttering Cambridge fellow who has
returned home for the funeral of his biology teaching and bee-keeping
father.
His mother is
on the point of running off with the man who has been her lover for
several years and when a close friend of the family later prepares a lunch
for those left behind, she stirs in a sprinkling of the dead man's ashes
to the soup thinking the jar in which they are kept is a pot of aromatic
herbs.
So plenty of
potential for laughs there - and we are not disappointed.
The character
of Felix himself is thoughtfully and very beautifully drawn by Richard
Matthews, a bit of a find for Next Stage who has already made his name in
Amadeus, Abandonment and recently A Streetcar Named Desire.
Joanna Bowman
takes the original Diana Rigg role as Felix's apparently ghastly mother
and Lesley Langley is the dotty family friend on the brink of having had
just about enough of the whole lot of them.
George Gent,
as the lover, really gets all the best lines and never fails to make full
use of any of them. Dave Dunn and Liz Hodges complete the cast all of whom
are directed by Ann Garner.
The whole
thing is set in a garden which in the Mission Theatre so vividly captures
England at its summery best that it is quite a shock to go outside and
find that it is actually a bitterly cold January night.
Even by Next
Stage's exacting standards this one really is a bit of a treat.
Runs until
Saturday at 7.30pm. Tickets £9 and £7 from box office on 01225 428600 or
Bath Festivals box office.
Christopher Hansford |
