What: Humble Boy
Where: Langham Court Theatre
When: To June 27
Rating: four stars (out of five)
Langham Court Theatre (more accurately the Victoria Theatre Guild) has of late forged a reputation for staging smart, literate show. This happy state of affairs continues with Humble Boy, a cerebral romp about bees, science and what makes humans buzz. I mean, tick.
British playwright Charlotte Jones created a stir when Humble Boy had its debut in 2001. The award-winning comedy is dauntingly ambitious, juggling great big ideas with the head-of-the-class virtuosity one associates with playwright Tom Stoppard.
Jones has taken the most famous line in English drama, “To be or not to be,” re-imagined it as “To bee or not to bee” and run it through a intellectual Mixmaster. The anti-hero, Felix, is a troubled theoretical astrophysicist visiting the family home in the Cotwalds after his father dies. Plagued by a stutter, the Hamlet-like young man discovers his mother, Flora, is now poised to marry their neighbour, George, the sort of vulgarian who pinches women’s bottoms while chuckling incessantly.
Felix’s old girlfriend Rosie pops in to inform him that, unbeknownst to him, she had his child seven years ago. Meanwhile, Flora’s pal Mercy inadvertently spices up the gazpacho with a pinch of the dead dad’s ashes.
Quite nicely acted by a strong cast under the joint direction of Angela Henry and Montgomery Bjornson, Humble Boy is satirical, contemporary take on Hamlet. The ghost of Felix’s father, a former beekeeper, flits in from time to time. Flora’s hastily arranged impending nuptials are Queen Gertrude-like. And Felix’s grief-stricken indecisiveness and occasional interest in suicide (there’s a farcical turn with a garden hose) are reminiscent of Shakespeare’s dithering Dane.
Not content with this trick, Jones also tosses in cleverly woven allusions to superstring theory and astrophysics.
Occasionally, Langham Court will assemble a gang of A-listers for a show. That’s the case here: Kyle Kushnir plays Felix, Wendy Magahay is Flora and a white-bearded Paul Terry, one of this city’s best actors, is the dear dead dad. On Friday night each had fine moments, as did Elizabeth Whitmarsh (Mercy), Melissa Taylor (Rosie) and Bill Christie (George).
Kushnir and Terry brought out the gentleness and whimsy within their characters with deft delicacy. Magahay was particularly impressive delivering Flora’s heart-felt monologue (she discovers her departed hubby immortalized her in a very special way — hint: it’s something to do with bees).
It’s true Flora is rather impenetrable and, at times, two dimensional; she seems unrelentingly vain and selfish. This sense of caricature seems more to do with the script than Magahay, however. In Humble Boy each character is, more or less, deliberately defined by a distinct characteristic. The play can even be viewed as a contemporary comedy of humours à la Ben Jonson.
This is a difficult one to pull off. Humble Boy is jam-packed with ideas; it’s witty as all get-out; it taps into the heart as well as the head (rather sentimentally at the end). On this evening, the occasional sequence lacked emotional resonance. Felix, for example, seemed oddly unmoved to discover he was a father; George’s angry eruptions at Felix sometimes seem to come out of nowhere.
Yet overall the production is a bona fide success. It’s moving, thought provoking, sometimes thrillingly original. And nothing tops the stupendous set of a manicured, sun-splashed backyard created by Doug Craig with Bill Adams. The level of detail is nothing short of thrilling. If you go, take time at intermission to examine the trunk of the apple tree framing one side of the stage, which in itself is a work of art.