Bee string theories

Humble Boy , a play by Charlotte Jones.

“I have been doubly unlucky in life: to marry a biologist and give birth to a physicist.” So says Flora Humble, the linchpin of Charlotte Jones's gentle new comedy. Flora's astronomer son — the 'Humble Boy' of the title — is home for her entomologist husband's funeral. For one long, hot summer, mother and son grope through grief towards an understanding of their own and the dead man's life, motivations and legacy.

Simon Russell Beale as Charlotte Jones's Felix Humble. Credit: CATHERINE ASHMORE

Humble Boy is an entertaining celebration-cum-send-up of the personal and professional quest for immortality through science, love and children. More a laid-back buffet in the manner of Yasmina Reza's recent Lifex3 than an earnest essay á la Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, it is a likeable domestic drama. It contrasts the personal satisfactions of amateur research (unbeknownst to his family, the late James Humble discovered a new strain of bee) with the gallery-playing antics of the academic life (Felix Humble's febrile pursuit of Cambridge kudos). The play pits the palpable beauty of the natural sciences (the garden setting is lovingly Latin-labelled by James's ghost) against the poetry of mathematical astrophysics (Felix transcends his stutter to enthuse on the equations describing the Universe's coiled dimensions).

Magpie-like, Jones picks shiny bits of grade-school science in a shameless but irresistible attempt to graft on gravitas. Her characters interrelate like the insects in James Humble's centre-stage hive. The indomitable Flora is the queen bee — life-giving and languid. Her husband, lover and even her son are drones bent to her bidding. Her childless female friend — her worker.

Similarly, the play's emotional journey skims off superstring theory's easy-to-digest cream. Professionally, Felix Humble is searching for a 'Theory of Everything' that will reconcile general relativity with quantum mechanics. This is echoed by his personal struggle to understand how the big events in life — births, deaths, marriages — are informed by the seemingly inconsequential stuff. It may sound trite but, thanks to Jones's facility with dialogue, it works.

Less successful is her recourse to tired tropes, such as the socially inept researcher evading his emotional shortcomings through a life of the mind. That her women find creative fulfilment and make their mark solely by having babies also jars. Jones redeems herself by painting parenthood as “full of Eureka moments”, thanks to the insatiable — scientist-like — curiosity of children. Profound? Not really. Pleasurable? Definitely.

Humble Boy is at London's Cottesloe Theatre.

Visualizations: The Nature Book of Art and Science, a collection of essays edited by Martin Kemp, is published by Oxford University Press (£20) and the University of California Press ($35).