| Review: Humble Boy | |
|  | Michael Matus as Felix Humble and Tabitha Wady as Rosie Pye
Photos: Alan Winn |
| | Charlotte Jones' comedy about the Humble and Pye families is being staged at the Northcott - and it's expertly performed by the cast.
Review: Danny Lawrence. |
| | | Humble Boy
Northcott Theatre, Exeter
Thurs 30th Sept - Sat 16th Oct 2004
Mon-Sat 7.30pm and 2.30pm Sat 16th Oct
Tickets: £11, £13 and £15.50
Box Office: 01392 493493
In Charlotte Jones' marvellous comedy we meet the Humble family and the Pye family - an elaborate set-up for a one-liner about what their double-barrelled married name might be.
Indeed, "Humble" and "Pye" are no arbitrary choices. As Charlotte Jones confesses, she couldn't resist putting witty asides into the script, many of them directly drawn from those surnames.
Let's pull the frills away and look at the basic story; a serious and potentially harrowing tale about an Oxbridge fellow at the peak of his academic research, who returns to his mother on the day of his father's funeral, and then discovers that his mother's been having an affair with his former lover's father, and that said lover, whom he ran away from years back, gave birth to his daughter.
 | | Michael J Jackson as George Pye, Sandra Duncan as Flora Humble |
Heavy stuff - hence potentially harrowing - but Charlotte Jones has penned such strong characters, and she shares with the cast a tremendous talent for droll humour, that you never feel bogged down by events.
Neither are you overwhelmed by the science - the Humble Boy is a theoretical astrophysicist and has an accordant habit of issuing diatribes on the matter, but it is the reactions of others that take the focus.
Of note in the cast, Michael Matus is Felix, the Humble Boy himself, with the appearance of David Jason's Granville in Open all Hours, and that excellent deliberate plodding manner manifested by those for whom everything is too much.
Michael J. Jackson is George Pye, the Humble Boy's would-be stepfather. He is a brash and crude Northern businessman, whose drunken antics are bound to draw applause.
So too Barbara Ewing, as the maid Mercy Lott - her Grace before dinner has the audience suffocating whimpers and exploding with appreciation at the end.
The mother, Flora Humble, is one of those women who thinks herself better than everybody and will eagerly make people aware of it.
Sandra Duncan plays this skilfully, although as the six actors line up for the bowing at the end and five are beaming, Miss Duncan could wipe Flora Humble's miserable glare from her face. Just briefly.
Humble Boy by Charlotte Jones
Northcott Theatre, Exeter
Thurs 30th Sept - Sat 16th Oct 2004
Mon-Sat 7.30pm and 2.30pm Sat 16th Oct
Tickets: £11, £13 and £15.50
Box Office: 01392 493493
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