Hope Has a Happy Meal (NHB Modern Plays)

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Hope (Laura Checkley) tells a long joke about a frustrated angel caught up in heavenly bureaucracy to the person sitting next to her on her flight. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a show at The Royal Court with a weak cast, and Hope has a Happy Meal is no different. Amaka Okafor’s Lor is convincingly passionate, and the women are well supported by Nima Taleghani’s Ali and Felix Scott’s Wayne. But as well as the joy of this humorously glo-brite vision, and the game show episode in which Hope’s deepest fears are presented in a nightmarish clown-led extravaganza, genuine emotions about the family are powerfully articulated. Early on in the 90-minute runtime, their journey feels like a cross between ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ and ‘The Wizard of Oz’ – a sort of fantastical secular allegory for the world we’re essentially living in now.

A surreal and frenetic quest through a hyper-capitalist country, Tom Fowler's play Hope has a Happy Meal premiered at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in June 2023, directed by Lucy Morrison, in a co-production with SISTER. He gives the actors lots to work with, and Royal Court Associate Director Lucy Morrison adds physical flair and playfulness to the piece.Not only has he heard it before, he says it’s less funny because she’s changed one of the names to hers.

If the show wasn’t such fun you could dismiss this as naive wishful thinking, but that would be to underrate the power of being kind in everyday life. Nevertheless, Fowler never loses his finely tuned sense of humour, leavening out the more overwrought moments with a welcome wryness. There is also something very allusive in his writing: the mention of Strawberry Fields commune brings to mind the Beatles song “Eleanor Rigby” when, some time later, it becomes evident that we are dealing with a situation that could be described as “all the lonely people, where do they all come from?That Hope goes on such a visually transformative personal journey in the space of an hour and forty minutes is credit to Checkley’s physical theatre talents, her body absorbing the tension in each scene as we build to the play’s violent crescendo. When Hope befriends Isla, a young woman raising her baby nephew, the two quickly find themselves on the run. Yet despite the infiltration of the market into everything and everywhere, Fowler argues that hope and happiness is still possible (just look at the title, which gets an ironic twist in the play’s ending).