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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