Humble Boy By Charlotte Jones

Felix Humble, bumbling Cambridge astrophysicist and cricket enthusiast, returns to the family home following the sudden death of his father. Flora, his difficult and demanding mother is determined to make a fresh start with George, a brash family friend. Secrets come tumbling out as Felix tries to come to terms with the past and what is yet to come.

Threads such as Hamlet, horticulture, black holes and beekeeping are woven into this warm and touching comedy which was first performed at the National Theatre in 2001 - winning the Critics' Circle Theatre Award for Best New Play and the People's Choice Best New Play Award.

Charlotte Jones is hailed by many as the natural successor to both Stoppard and Ayckbourn for her intelligent and richly comic scripts. Oxford Theatre Guild has a long history of performing to both audience and critical acclaim at the Playhouse.

'This is a marvellous play: harsh and forgiving: sad, very sad; funny, very, very funny...a feast.' Sunday Times

Monday 24 January 2011

Random Jottings from the Director – First rehearsals...

After many months of planning, rehearsals for Humble Boy have now started and it is a joy to be working with the cast and crew to put this great play on the stage of the Oxford Playhouse.

But why this particular play?

I remember reading it many years ago and loving it for the clever blend of humour and emotional honesty. Charlotte Jones – as any good Oxford-educated author should – manages to combine a whole range of topics with some deftly drawn characters into a script that can make you laugh and cry with some brilliant lines.


Too often authors can showcase their brilliance with plays that wear their erudition on their sleeves. Jones certainly knows her stuff but she weaves astrophysics, bee-keeping and Hamlet into this comedy about a dysfunctional family without overloading the text with too much research being on display. This is something that I feel she manages with greater skill than Tom Stoppard (a writer with whom she is often compared) – a man who never misses a trick when it comes to laying on the details in his plays.

I returned to Humble Boy when I was putting together my proposal to Oxford Theatre Guild and felt that it really does match the talents available in the company as well as being something that audiences would enjoy as well as being a play with which they can relate. And so it has proved.

I have assembled a very talented and experienced cast who have already, in four short rehearsals, shown enormous empathy for their characters as well as an innate understanding of how to make the humour of the words come to life on the stage.

We have many weeks ahead of us to bring all of the elements of the production together – we are lucky to have many talented creative and technically astute people in the team to support the cast. I am sure that over the coming weeks, we will hear more from some of them in this blog.

April feels a long way off and yet scarily close – it is going to be an exciting three months.

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