The Beginning

In late 2008, playwright Tyrone Huggins saw a call out for a project organised by Theatre Writing Partnership, New Perspectives and Eastern Angles. The call out was for a piece of work that had a Black perspective and could be toured rurally.

At the time, Tyrone was working on a project he called the Digital Inheritance Project where he worked on 4 plays about the Caribbean diaspora and 4 plays on the way the digital world is influencing how we live today.

One of these plays explored the relationship between a digital character and an analogue character which Tyrone decided to pitch for the call out. Spoiler alert! That play then became The Honey Man.

The Honey Man was originally picked up by Eastern Angles as a possible commission. As part of that initial process with Eastern Angles, Tyrone went to see one of their shows at a rural venue which got him thinking about how to adapt The Honey Man to suit a rural audience.

“I thought it was interesting,” Tyrone recalls. “The audience would not just want anything it would be good to give them something they can connect with. So, I extended the idea of The Honey Man to be about a manor house.”

Somewhere along the way things shifted and it turned out that Daniel Buckroyd, New Perspectives Artistic Director from 2003 – 2012, was more interested in The Honey Man and so New Perspectives picked up the production.

From 2009-2011, Daniel and Tyrone organised a series of workshops to develop the script. And then, in 2012, The Honey Man was slated for a national rural tour with New Perspectives.

The Rehearsals and the Crisis

“I arrived there in Derby, and I was going to be there just as the writer. On the morning, the actress arrived, the producers were all there, but the actor who was cast to play the Honey Man failed to show up,” Tyrone says.

“By 11, everyone was getting a bit jumpy and Daniel said either you’re going to have to do it or we’re going to have to go and cast this show again. And the casting had been so tortuous that I thought I can’t go through that process again. So, by 1 o’clock that day I was starting rehearsals as The Honey Man.”

When asked about the challenges of being in a play that you’ve written, Tyrone said: “For me, writing a play is completed in rehearsals, and so after 3 days of rehearsals I went back home and started to rewrite. I then travelled back to Derby in the morning to carry on rehearsals.”

“I’m reasonably disciplined in the difference of the roles of actor and writer, so I was fully supportive of any cuts or changes Suzanne Gorman, the director, wanted to make. Even though there were a couple of moments where I went ‘eek!’”

For Tyrone, the most important was developing a strong partnership with his co-star Esther Smith who played Misty: “I spent a lot of time with Esther developing a personal and professional relationship so that we could connect with the performance. The rehearsal period was about that and bringing into the room experiences that had informed the play.

“Distancing myself from the play as a writer and focussing on myself as an actor was probably the biggest challenge, but also the biggest comfort for me because as I was playing the part I thought actually this play is quite good!”

The Inspiration for The Honey Man

The Honey Man was inspired by a trip to St Kitts in the early 2000s, where Tyrone was born and left in the late 1950’s. During which one of his friends took him to see the Honey Man, a man who was able to make medicines and heal people with herbs.

“I was interested in that idea that there are old ways of healing that some people know and that somehow in our culture we’ve lost that. I thought that probably in rural places there was still some of that memory remaining.

“The Honey Man in the play was a bee whisperer. He could train his bees to take the right kind of nectar from different plants to make different healing kinds of honey.”

Tyrone was also inspired by First Viscount Nelson, whose wife Frances was from Nevis, as well as old paintings. St Kitts and Nevis are now a Federated Caribbean country.

“I was fascinated by the paintings in which you saw the family and then you saw this black figure who never got mentioned and I thought: how do you get the story of that character? There were no records so why not just invent it.”

Tyrone felt that despite where the play was set, it would still appeal to rural audiences in the UK: “The rural people in the Caribbean, in India, in Africa have the same world view as those in England.”

The Tour

The play went on a six-week rural tour which to Tyrone, who started his career in 1978 touring rurally with Impact Theatre, felt like “revisiting those spaces”.

At each venue on tour Tyrone took a photograph of the venue and the New Perspectives van: “That sort of in a way encapsulates the memories of the tour for me. Especially that one day where the NP van broke down and we had to get another van so in the flow of the photographs suddenly there’s one without that distinctive turquoise van.”

The Honey Man was welcomed by audiences across the UK and is often still talked about as a great play by the people who worked on it.

“People were charmed by it,” Tyrone remembers.

“They were really open to it – some people found the end a little challenging, they didn’t want or expect it. It takes the story into a slightly different world; the rest of the play is quite comfortable, and some people found that unnecessary. But, by then they’d connected to the characters, so they had to confront and engage with it.

“I tried to set it up so that it was something that you’d naturally warm to. A young girl and older man in a granddaughter-grandfather relationship. But I wanted that challenge to be there. Look at this painting, look at the story behind it. When you next go to one of your galleries think about the people who aren’t named in those paintings.”

Tyrone remembers people on tour asking if it was a true story or would remark that there was a very similar story that happened where they live.

In addition to wanting to challenge audiences with the ending, Tyrone also wanted the themes of analogue vs digital within the play to broaden audiences world view: “There were people who were probably having children and grandchildren who were going off to university and meeting this multicultural world and bringing it back and they’d want to understand what their children and grandchildren were talking about and relating to.”

The Honey Man Legacy

After the success of the rural tour by New Perspectives in 2012, The Honey Man was picked up by independent producer and former New Perspectives board member Judy Owen who organised a theatre tour of the play in 2015.

“I was curious about how it would work in an urban environment,” Tyrone said of the play’s second outing. “There was a sense for me of how would it work as it’s a more subtle and insidious approach to theatre.

“If you put on a play about the black population and the white population of this country it immediately raises people’s hackles. And if you don’t do that then people wonder what you’re doing. The play was constructed not to be radical in that sense, so I was interested in how people would respond to it.”

The 2015 version of The Honey Man had a different set and a different director, but Tyrone reprised his role as the Honey Man. However, during lockdown, Daniel Buckroyd, who had since left New Perspectives, produced a third production which Tyrone wasn’t involved in at all aside from handing over the script.

With themes of race, the digital world and healing, The Honey Man is just as relevant in 2024 as it was 12 years ago. Tyrone agrees, stating: “I’ve got a desire to do it again.”