Full of big ideas

HUMBLE BOY (Oldham Coliseum)

CHARLOTTE Jones’S highly-successful play was commissioned as a counterpoint to a National Theatre production of Hamlet.

It deals with similar characters in a modern setting: vain mother who doesn’t much like son; son who hates prospective new father, real father only recently dead; son’s former girlfriend getting in the way with awkward news, and so on.

And it is likewise a play about big ideas: not quite usurping a kingdom-scale ideas that send you mad, but certainly a story set in an ordinary Ayckbourn-style middle-England garden, with a handful of ordinary characters, which takes in astrophysics, black holes, moments of epiphany, small lives and big disappointments. Oh, and bees. And it’s even quite funny.

The pleasure is in watching Jones mash these ideas, personal and grand, humble and epic, into a whole that produces more than its elements at first suggest.

And there’s an added pleasure in watching her characters develop. In a first half that draws information slowly out of the Humbles — former Bunny Girl, vain and shallow Flora and her clumsy, brilliant, socially-inept physicist son Felix, back for his father’s funeral — and the Pyes, down-to-earth transport boss and Flora’s would-be new husband George and his independent, single-mum daughter Rosie, plus Flora’s much-put-upon friend Mercy and gardener Jim, we wonder what exactly is going on.

In the second, we sit back and watch them get on with it, with a couple of moments of almost farcical comedy among the rows and recriminations.

We have seen a couple of strong London Classic Theatre productions at the Coliseum before (“Abigail’s Party” and creepy drama, “Frozen”), and this at first seems the thin end of the deal.

The first half comes and goes with few laughs but lots of places where they would seem to have been missed — Pauline Whitaker’s Flora, for instance, seems not amusingly, sarcastically miserable but just flat depressed.

But in the second half things pick up, with a nice balance between heated revelation, polite conversation and full-on farcical events.

John Dorney as Felix steers a nice line between endearingly inept and infuriatingly dense. Likewise Flora gains more humanity than the opening scenes would lead you to expect.

Carole Dance is charmingly put-upon as Mercy, her character revealing the hurt under her busybody hide, while Catherine Harvey has charm as Rosie and Peter Cadden a likeable bluffness as George. Even Jim the mysterious gardener (Martin Wimbush) has an unexpected side to him.