Writer: Rosie Day
Director: Hannah Price
Rosie Day’s new play (This is not a) Happy Room at the King’s Head Theatre is packed with laugh-out-loud scenes. Three adult siblings meet up for their father’s wedding (his third – or is it his fourth?) in a tacky function room in Blackpool and immediately revert to their bickering adolescence. Later on their mother Esther appears. She’s an imperious woman, played with suitable brittleness by Amanda Abbington, her loftiness covering up her guilt that she abandoned the children for three years when they were small.
Laura, the oldest, compelling played by Andrea Valls, is a human rights lawyer. Laura is very much head of the family, treating the others with a certain condescension. She and her compliant husband, Charles (Tom Kanji) seem a smug couple, proudly totting around their new baby girl. But there’s a running joke that they keep accidentally leaving (abandoning?) her in unseen rooms.
Elle (played by Rosie Day herself) is an aspiring actress who’s got a part in a film in Australia. She has a fragile air, and it comes as little surprise when she reveals she’s struggled in the past with anorexia. Brother Simon (Jonny Weldon), enters with dark glasses and a cane, suggesting he is in some way disabled (how acceptable is this these days as a comic trope?). But in fact, he’s just a walking hypochondriac, needily detailing his various non-threatening conditions. Every so often their bemused great aunt Agatha appears to ask what’s going on or to whip food off the buffet. It’s a lovely turn by newcomer Alison Liney.
Scene follows scene much in the manner of a sitcom. But Day has more ambitious plans. The publicity boasts ‘One wedding. One funeral. Zero boundaries’, so it’s no spoiler to say the father bridegroom never arrives and the family end up, somewhat improbably, turning the planned wedding into a memorial. As Hamlet didn’t quite say, the wedding baked meats can coldly furnish forth the funeral table.
Day wants to use this change in fortunes to get beneath the skin of her characters, reflections on their father and upbringing working to flesh out their comic two-dimensionality. But it’s difficult to shift the tone, and indeed the underlying comic structure doesn’t help make this convincing. For a start, it becomes increasingly evident, in the rather dispiriting references to how many hours still remain before the planned event, that it’s all gone a bit Waiting for Godot. We’re going to be stuck in this reception room in scene after scene, hoping something might happen, beyond the no-longer very insightful idea that Larkin was right about your parents fucking you up.
It’s a relief when a new character enters. This is American Hayley (Jazz Jenkins), second cousin to the bride-to-be who, now safely in ICU seems to be of zero interest. Rather too conveniently, Hayley is a psychologist, so the four main characters can have meaningful one-to-ones with her. The comedy deliberately fades as the situation not so much darkens as reveals its architectural underpinnings. There’s not much director Hannah Price can do about the pace which slows almost to a standstill. With no obvious endpoint for the story arc, the play’s 90 minutes (considerably longer on press night) feel increasingly over-extended.
(This is not a) Happy Room has much potential but needs rigorous editing.
Runs until 27 April 2025
The Reviews Hub Score
Comic potential
