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Stag Theatre Company preview |
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Page 1 of 2 
 This is my father. You have just handed me my father in a pot,” cries Felix Humble in despair to his mother Flora when he undoes the birthday wrapping paper and finds a honeypot containing his father’s ashes. “I thought that we could have a little ceremony. And that then you could scatter him,” replies Flora. “What’s left of him. You tipped half of him down the sink,” counters the bereaved Felix.
Death happens to all of us, and some people manage to “move on” quickly, while others don’t. That’s one of the themes of Humble Boy, the new production at the Ship Theatre, Sevenoaks by the Stag Theatre Company.
Director Sandra Barfield says the play’s dialogue succeeds in being very funny and agonisingly painful at the same time. No wonder that Simon Russell Beale and Diana Rigg jumped at the chance of playing Felix and Flora when the two-act comedy by Charlotte Jones had its premiere at the National Theatre seven years ago.
“You’ve got some real comedy and some very acerbic, hard-hitting lines, but you’ve got to feel real sympathy for all the characters,” says Sandra, who is busy rehearsing her cast of six in a Sevenoaks church hall. “You’ve actually got to like them, even if you find them a bit strange. That’s the hardest thing.”
Many Sevenoaks theatregoers will recall the Stag Theatre Company’s hilarious production of Michael Frayn’s farce Noises Off in the same theatre a year ago; Humble Boy has the same director and four members of the same cast, but it’s a different kind of comedy: more subtle and more painful. Felix is an astrophysicist in his thirties whose personal life is a muddle, while his mother initially seems a self-absorbed monster.
Their reactions to the sudden death of Felix’s father, an amateur beekeeper, spark a jealous conflict which has echoes of Hamlet. By the end of the play, the audience realises that Flora is not quite as hard as she seems.
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 01 May 2008 )
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