July 09, 2009

'Humble Boy'














Robyn Wiley and Matthew Purdon
star in a modern reduction of 'Hamlet'


The quantum mechanics of bees


Or, to be a bee,
or to let bees
let bees be bees

By Mark Langton
IJ Correspondent

Bravo to Ross Valley Players for taking on the Northern California premiere of a difficult, but beautifully written, contemporary work like “Humble Boy” by hot new British playwright Charlotte Jones. It opened Friday night at the Barn Theatre in Ross.

“Humble Boy” is a rich honeycomb of poetry and science, wrapped in an English comedy of country manners, that, we soon discover, is actually a reduction of William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.”

Playwright Jones’ willingness to take on huge themes -- death, bereavement, immortality, betrayal, love -- is equaled only by her intellectual curiosity when it comes to big ideas. And they don’t come much bigger than astrophysics and quantum mechanics.

Felix Humble (Mathew Purdon) is an overweight, somewhat overwrought astrophysicist from Cambridge who has returned to his family home for the funeral of his father.

Purdon’s Felix is a moody, indecisive young man, given to suicidal ideation. Remind you of anyone? His professor-cum-beekeeper father has just died, and he’s just discovered that his mother is already keeping company with another old coot, whom she intends to marry with, what Felix feels is, unseemly haste. Sound familiar? Perhaps so, but this play is no tragedy the way “Hamlet” is tragic. It’s an elegant comedy that charms and amuses with dry, parlor room dialogue that would make Tom Stoppard proud.

Once Humble's mother, Flora (Robyn Wiley) comes on the scene we begin to understand where his dysfunction comes from, as she starts to skewer him verbally, treating him like a simple-minded, red-headed stepchild. In point of fact, he's a research fellow in theoretical physics at Cambridge, hoping soon to find "the mother of all theories, a unified field theory" that will reconcile Einstein’s theory of relativity with quantum mechanics. At present, it has put him into an existential spin.

“The equations don't exist for what I can already sense,” says Felix. “ I can't ... hold all the notes, all the variables, all the harmonies in my head..” When those are replaced by the sounds of a buzzing hive, we cannot help but fear for our dear Felix.

His mother, Flora, is overbearing in the extreme, blaming her own misery on her son, her late husband, the weather, bees, pointing her finger at everyone but back at herself. She aims her comments at her son like a circus knife-thrower, wounding him with each successive throw -- tossing out stingers like, "I have been doubly unlucky in my life. To marry a biologist and give birth to a physicist.” Her very presence is so toxic to Felix that he actually stutters in her presence.

Felix discovers she is having an affair with a neighbor, George Pye, played by Simon Boddington. Pye has no love for Felix, and the feeling is mutual. It is amusing to note that Flora's married name is Humble and George's last name is Pye. Given Jones' penchant for punning, perhaps it is a suggestion of what Flora feels like she's eating when suffering a mouthful of the social-climbing George.

The cast is completed by George's daughter Rosie (Mary Beth Smith), Felix’ ex-girlfriend from seven years back; also Mercy Lott ( Lynn Stofle), a neurotic family friend -- and the play's female Polonius -- and Jim, the Gardener (David Bintinger), just a bare wisp of a fella. The Hamlet parallels are clever, almost glib, but never truly integral, nor do they prevent the play from telling a story of its own.

One performance that stood out as absolutely authentic was Mary Beth Smith’s Rosie. The character is written somewhat one-dimensionally as merely promiscuous. In Smith’s hands, a stronger character emerged – almost a feminist sensibility in the quality of independence she brought to Rosie, never striking a false note.

Busy, buzzing bees are at the poetic heart of this extended metaphor of a play –indeed, even its title, “Humble Boy,” is but a short, onomatopoetic leap to “bumble bee”), and actress Wiley is perfectly cast as the queen of this buzzing little hive. Wiley even looks like a bee, with her large, black sunglasses, suggestive of huge insect eyes and her hair done up in (what else?) a beehive. She is groomed, politely dressed, but there is nothing coiffed about her anger, or her despair.

Even though this play was written with Felix at the center, due to the sheer force of Wiley’s talent and experience – and, what appeared to be Purdon’s lack of same – this interpretation has the mother at the fore.

Wiley’s scenes with Boddington’s George have a playful quality that contain moments of truth for both actors. George is written as kind of a social-climbing, pawing lout; however, this is not possible with Boddington. He has an air about him that is both capable and charming -- a virile, Sean Connery-like, rough-and-tumble Australian thing going on – though Boddington actually hails from Hartfordshire, England. Where h-urricanes, h-ardly, h-appen.

For all the talk about bees and black holes, however, it is as a son-and-mother story and a study in grief that Jones's play works best. Without giving anything away, there are transformative moments in the second half -- in the performances, the language and the tale -- that would confirm for anyone who pays attention that this is an important new work.

Just as Hamlet reminds Horatio that “there are more things in Heaven and Earth that can be dreamed" in his philosophy, so, too, does Felix discover not even a unifying theory of "everything" can truly explain the depths of the human heart. Could it explain the rules for, say, the kind of love that knows no law?

Go see this play. Make a bee-line for it.


Marin Independent Journal

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