First seen in 2001, Charlotte Jones's play is an English country Hamlet featuring the melancholic figure of Felix Humble, a ill-adjusted physicist whose attempts to conceive a general theory of everything have come to naught. Hhe who returns to his late father's Cotswold garden to find his beloved bees have disappeared and his mother preparing to remarry before the funeral nibbles have reached room temperature.
Like the lowly bumble itself, it's a miracle that such an unaerodynamic package of astrophysics, apiculture and Shakespearean allusion ever gets off the ground. But Jones's ability to combine complex science with acute, comic characterisation has an almost Stoppardian elegance. It's the kind of gently observant play that the New Vic's quietly impressive artistic director Theresa Heskins does particularly well. Martin Miller makes a fine impression as Felix, a cumbersome, tongue-tied figure who cannot stumble across a garden hose without using it to illustrate the finer points of string theory before twisting it into a noose.
A former actor, Jones is conscious of allowing no character to go to waste. If it at first appears that Julia Munrow's dithering Mercy is no more than a conduit for platitudinous remarks, she redeems herself by reciting a hilarious grace that betrays a complete collapse of religious faith between "For what we are about to receive" and "Amen".
Carol Royle is never far from hysteria as Felix's vain, petulant mother, and there's an equally boorish turn from Andy Hockley as the Claudian usurper. Even if the indignities heaped on the late Mr Humble's mortal remains stretch credulity somewhat, it will make you think twice before seasoning chilled soup from an unmarked pot.
