Theatre review: Humble Boy

I didn't catch Charlotte Jones' Humble Boy when it premiered at the National in 2001, but I've heard it mentioned a lot since as one of the best-loved new plays of the time. Paul Miller now tests how well it's aged with a revival of this gentle tragicomedy with overt Hamlet allusions. Designer Simon Daw has gone all-out in transforming the Orange Tree's in-the-round stage into the garden of Flora Humble's (Belinda Lang) Cotswolds home. Her husband has just died and her son Felix (Jonathan Broadbent) has returned after a long absence to attend the funeral, only to disappear when he was meant to be giving the eulogy. Felix is a theoretical astrophysicist who's been trying to find a unifying theory of the cosmos. His attempts to examine his inner life have been as unsuccessful as those to examine black holes, and he arrives back at the family home still in a suicidal mood.

Theatre review: This Was A Man

Among the plays the Finborough unearths that haven't been performed for decades, there's the odd one that hasn't been performed at all, at least not in this country. That's how they can produce the UK premiere of a play by a beloved, long-dead author: Noël Coward's This Was A Man was banned in 1925 for its flippant approach to marital infidelity, and ended up getting its first outing on Broadway instead. By the time the Lord Chamberlain's office had lost the power to ban plays, this one was long-forgotten, so Belinda Lang's is the first production to dig it up in decades. Edward (Jamie De Courcey) is an artist who's started to get some success with his portraits of society women in uncomfortable poses (it makes them feel like they've got their money's worth.) But he's not happy, because his wife Carol (Dorothea Myer-Bennett) has been carrying out a string of affairs, often in public.

Theatre review: The School for Scandal

I really didn't plan for this to be a year when I went to a lot of new theatres (I have too many to keep up with already) but the newly-opened Park Theatre's main house is hosting a production of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The School for Scandal directed by Jessica Swale. And as Swale's productions of Restoration comedy are a perennial favourite of mine, with last year's The Busy Body making my annual Top Ten, I couldn't let this slip through the net. The Surface brothers have very different reputations: Joseph (Tom Berish) has carefully cultivated a good name for himself and is well thought-of in society, while his brother Charles (Harry Kerr) is a drunkard, rumoured to be trying to seduce the newly-married Lady Teazle (Kirsty Besterman.) When their wealthy benefactor Sir Oliver (Timothy Speyer) returns from India, he has a suspicion that things are very different beneath the surface, and sets about tricking his nephews into revealing their true selves.