Humble Boy
Playwright: Charlotte Jones Director: Paul Miller
Orange Tree Theatre, Clarence Street, Richmond (020-8740 3633). Until 14 April Running time: 2hrs 30mins (including interval)
★★★ Choosing the plays that make up a theatre’s programme is an art form in itself, said Aleks Sierz on The Arts Desk. At the Orange Tree, artistic director Paul Miller is currently on a “continuous roll with his inspired mixing of the old and the new, forgotten classics and new voices, revivals and premieres”. His latest success is this first London revival of Humble Boy, a zesty, metaphor-rich family drama that was a smash hit for the National Theatre in 2001. If Miller can’t offer the original’s starry cast (Simon Russell Beale, Diana Rigg) he certainly succeeds in presenting this Cotswoldian spin on Hamlet with “commendable freshness and vigour”. It’s an excellent revival, agreed Ben Lawrence in The Daily Telegraph, in which the play emerges as fast, furious, clever and funny, even if its “comfortable rural middleclassness feels unfashionable” in today’s more austere theatrical landscape.
To my mind, this superb revival is “far superior to the earlier production”, said Michael Billington in The Guardian. All the performances are “perfectly in key”, including the central duo of Jonathan Broadbent as Felix – a thirtysomething astrophysicist who has returned home to mourn his beekeeping father – and Belinda Lang as his appearance-obsessed mother. And there’s a glorious performance from Selina Cadell as Mercy, a busybody neighbour. The moment when Mercy, in her attempt to say grace before lunch, “reveals the emotional confusion of herself, and everyone else, becomes” – in Cadell’s hands – “one of the best pieces of acting you will see anywhere”.
For me, the play doesn’t quite work, said Ann Treneman in The Times. Humble Boy is a “bumper car crash of funny and sad, but the operative word is crash”. The comic timing is spot on and the funny bits are great. But the sad bits don’t ring true, and the constant “mini science lectures” – we learn an awful lot about bees and superstring theory – feel “sprinkled” over the drama, rather than woven into it. Personally, I longed for the play to “set itself free and become the Cotswolds sitcom that it yearns to be”.