Playbill for Humble Boy, which is causing a buzz in London.
A play about a suicidal astrophysicist, based loosely on Shakespeare's Hamlet, is proving to be a critical and financial success at London's Royal National Theatre. Humble Boy, Charlotte Jones's new comedy, is a scientific fantasy and a tough family drama.
Felix Humble, played by Simon Russell Beale, is a theoretical astrophysicist in his thirties who has returned home for the funeral of his father, a biologist and beekeeper. Like many scientists depicted in popular culture, Felix has bad fashion sense, although instead of the lab coat, he wears ill-fitting cricket whites. He discovers that his mother Flora (Diana Rigg) intends to marry George Pye, a suitor he loathes. Complicating matters, Felix earlier had an affair with George's daughter Rose, who gave birth to a child he has never known.
The play tries to convey Felix's excitement about trying to work out, as the character says, "a unified field theory that will reconcile relativity and quantum mechanics," and the split desire he feels for loneliness and companionship.
"There aren't many playwrights bold enough to relate personal relationships to cutting-edge theoretical physics," Beale told the Guardian newspaper. All the actors had lessons in physics during rehearsals to help them understand superstring theory.
Feynman in New York
"QED," with Alan Alda starring
as Richard Feynman, will run in Lincoln
Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater in
New York on Sunday and Monday evenings
until 17 December. The play opened
in California this past spring (see Physics Today, April 2001, page 29).
Jones says that she decided to write a play about a physicist after she visualized a man pottering around the garden like a bumblebee, and "according to the laws of physics, the body shape of the bumblebee should make flight impossible." The idea of incorporating superstring theory came after she heard string theorist Brian Greene from Columbia University in New York discuss his book, The Elegant Universe (W.W. Norton & Company, 1999), on the radio.
"I have been surprised and gratified by the number of undertakings in the arts of late that have some connection to string theory," says Greene. He points to a dance piece in New York, an independent movie being shot in Los Angeles, and a play called Calabi-Yau, which have all been inspired by the theory. "All these works really speak to the way these ideas about how the universe is structured strike a deep, resonant chord in the human spirit," says Greene. "Many, if not all of us, are searching in one way or another for the truth."
Humble Boy is sold out through the end of November. After that, it's expected to move to the center of London's theater district, the West End. Further details are available online at http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk.
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