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"Where the ghost of Hamlet and the prince meet, and everyone ends in mincemeat," was the classic comic summary of Shakespeare's "Hamlet," by longtime MGM publicist and songwriter Howard Dietz.

Well, in British playwright Charlotte Jones' tragi-comedy "Humble Boy," the tale of "Hamlet" is retold, but without the prince -- at least in any recognizable incarnation -- and none of the other characters end in mincemeat.

Instead, in the hands of director Lee Mikeska Gardner, the father dies suddenly under suspicious circumstances; the son returns home to confront adulterous mother and discovers a lurking, would-be stepfather; and then stumbles into a troubled reunion with an old girlfriend. The end result is a mirthful look at the same issues raised by the Bard of Avon, but funnier and less lethal.

"Humble Boy" plays at Fairfax's first professional theatre, 1st Stage -- near Tysons Corner in McLean -- through April 18. And the performances of all six actors are uniformly first-rate, a validation of the Washington, D.C.-area Helen Hayes award for outstanding emerging theater company going to 1st Stage in a ceremony a few days from now at Warner Theatre.

Felix Humble, portrayed believably with a stammering, heartfelt hope for redemption by Matt Dewberry in his 1st Stage debut, is a Cambridge University research fellow in astrophysics. Humble is timid and unworldly, a loveable casualty, who returns home to the Cotswolds suburban cottage after the death of his father, a mild-mannered prep-school biology teacher and apiarist.

Bees -- or their absence -- and beekeeping attempt to join the world of quantum physics and cosmology, and give this play the topical surface for many academic jokes and well-turned phrases -- as a result, the audience tittered with rapt appreciation throughout. Felix is consumed with thoughts of discovering "the mother of all theories, a unified theory of everything."

What he discovers instead is his own mother, Flora Humble, who is self-centered and powerful as well as mercilessly elegant. This "queen bee" is portrayed by MiRan Powell, who was trained at Smith College and The Shakespeare Theatre. Powell's channeling of Flora's upper-class evil seems bred in the genteel bone.

"I am your mother," she taunts him at one point mid-tirade.

"Well, you have to do a bit of mothering to earn that title," Felix replies.

Soon, it is learned that his father died not of the reported heart attack but was instead killed by his own bees. Flora purrs, "If it's any consolation, the bee died as well."

There are many moments of both mirth and misery as the tale unwinds, such as the morbidly funny occasion when the well-named Mercy Lott, the meddling spinster from next door played by Martha Karl, accidentally seasons the gazpacho soup with the ashes of the deceased father.

Meanwhile, the ghost of Felix's father, played by 1st Stage co-founder David Winkler, returns to haunt his wife, who is herself consumed with guilt and despair over her own life's adulterous downward spiral. And her longtime lover, the blustering George Pye -- in a meld of Claudius and Polonius -- is evoked by Jeff Murray, a retired Foreign Service officer. Finally, Nevie Brooks, an English and theater double major at University of Maryland, College Park, gives a lewd and lovely air to Rosie Pye, the Ophelia-clone, who seven years earlier gave birth to Felix's son.

Ultimately, the play is about bereavement and reconciliation. Felix hopes for a "eureka" moment of lucid discovery like that of Sir Isaac Newton when the apple falls from a tree, but alas, the apple falls for Felix when he is not even there to witness it. Even so, when all painful truths and family secrets are revealed, there is a rough kind of harmony for this dysfunctional extended family.