Humble Boy's beeline to success

Humble Boy: Based on Shakespeare's Hamlet

By BBC News Online's Matt Slater

Bee-keeping, gardening, Shakespeare, astro-physics, Glenn Miller, Felicity Kendall; there really is something to suit every taste in Charlotte Jones' much-heralded new play.

Having opened at the National's Cottesloe Theatre last summer, Humble Boy has just transferred to London's West End.

A raft of rave reviews and a Critics' Choice best new play award has elevated its status and heightened expectation. Humble by name, ambitious by nature.

Set in a gloriously unkempt garden somewhere in middle England's Cotswolds, the play is a reworking of Hamlet with bells on - just in case Shakespeare's play was not complex enough already.

So on top of a "son comes home to bury his dead father and finds his mum about to marry a git" story, Jones has added a welter of scientific references.

The queen bee is Kendall as a glamorous widow

The most effective of these is bee-keeping - the dead father's passion - and there is much pontificating on the social structure of the beehive.

The queen bee of the piece is Kendall's character, Flora Humble. An improbably glamorous 50-something widow - a wonderful advert for royal jelly - Flora is a vain and selfish woman with a cutting wit.

Filling the angst-ridden son role is Felix Humble. Superbly played by Simon Russell Beale, Felix is a 35-year-old Cambridge fellow more at ease when trying to find a "theory of everything" than when dressing himself or talking to other adults.

A bundle of nervous energy and Freudian despair, Felix finds himself unable to address his feelings for the biology teacher father he felt little respect for, or deal with his mother's reawakened sexuality.

Tangled

The object of Flora's desire is George, a village rake with a coarse manner and a love for the swinging sounds of the big band era.

Enthusiastically played by Dennis Quilley, George is a confusing mix of low farce and lofty sentiments. He is also the father of Felix's ex, Rosie, who, in turn, is the mother of a daughter Felix knows nothing about.

Not so much a love triangle as a love square, and towards the end, a love pentagon, as a ghostly Jim Humble, the bee-keeping biologist, makes a reappearance.

Amid all the knockabout relationship stuff and bombastic discourse on the nature of being - or should that be beeing? - there are great lines and highly comedic moments.

In fact, Jones might have been better served by consigning the astro-physics and apiculture to the black hole of her wastepaper bin, because what would be left is an entertaining comedy of family relationships.

That said, the added ingredients only distract, they do not ruin. The whole just about works, the cast is first class and Jones is a talent worth supporting.

Humble Boy by Charlotte Jones is on at the Gielgud Theatre in London