The Honey Man is an original play by Tyrone Huggins about a friendship between an ageing Caribbean man and a teenage girl, daughter to the Lord of the Manor. The play explores the generational and cultural differences between them, then questions whether they are really worlds apart from each other, as they first thought.

The script by Tyrone Huggins is cleverly written, surprising and uses language strikingly and memorably. The two central characters, the Honey Man and Misty, are characterised brilliantly and believably with distinct voices and polar personalities; and to me the bees felt like a third character, with a definite presence onstage. Other characters, although they never appear in person, seemed just as real in the minds of the audience through the way they were described and talked about, and through filling in the gaps in Misty’s phone conversations.

The Honey Man himself (played by the writer, Tyrone Huggins) seems both wise and playful, and was incredibly endearing. We were compelled by his sense of determination and purpose, his quiet self-certainty and his unfaltering dedication to the bees. Misty (Beatrice Allen) was a wonderful character who felt familiar from her very first line, and over the course of the play grew from a bored, slightly petulant teenager, to a person with more self-understanding and confidence and an open mind. Both characters had hidden vulnerability that made them very believable, and there was something about the story of growth and shared understanding between them that felt, to me at least, almost therapeutic to watch.

The play makes masterful use of scenery to really immerse the audience in the story they are watching. The rustic, dark wooden staging, set at jaunty disconcerting angles, is fantastically designed, giving a backdrop for the play that seems at once sharply real and oddly dreamlike. Cleverly built into the set are little clues and reminders that keep the audience grounded in the world of the play and help us enter the minds of the characters. For example, the model of the manor house in the back corner of the stage, ever-present in Misty’s mind, helps us understand both the sense of belonging and oppression her home represents for her.

Sound was really important: traditional music blended into techno as the two generations met; the buzzing of bees ran through our heads almost constantly and music was used hauntingly to create atmosphere during some of the darker/more surreal scenes. The simple but clever use of projected images was also very effective and sometimes quite haunting.

This play is very unusual in exploring the gap between the old and the young. It also deals with questions about race and racism in a powerful and unusual way. The story of the character's shared history is gripping, startling and moving. The Honey Man is a powerful piece of theatre that investigates difficult issues confidently, and is also an uplifting story about how two people can bridge the distance between one another. As the relationship between them grows from mistrust and hostility to respect and friendship, Tyrone Huggins shows us how much can be learnt from an unusual friendship – what the old can teach the young and what the young can teach the old.