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‘Happy Ending’ is not a play about massage parlours. It’s about a very different type of petite mort. Or une grande mort, actually: the big C. But writer Anat Gov, who succumbed to the disease in 2012 after writing this play, doesn’t want to hide it in furtive shorthands, she wants us to say it as clearly as possible. So I will. This play is about cancer.
This play is also a bit bananas. Almost endearingly so. Who could truly dislike a show in which, at one point, cancer is embodied by a man dressed as a quasi-Spanish flamenco star with lobster claws, who dances with a patient to a song called ‘Our Love Grows Cell by Cell’? ‘Happy Ending’ is not really a musical, though it purports to be. Over two hours, Shlomi Shaban and Michal Solomon provide only four songs and these are most definitely the fantasy moments in this self-proclaimed ‘musical comedy fantasy’. They are grotesque, brimming with black-as-a-moonless-night humour and are almost entirely irrelevant to the storyline.
On an oncology ward, God-fearing Sarah, hippy Miki and angry fighter Silvia get excited when their usually uneventful treatment session is joined by glamourpuss actress Carrie Evans. Somewhat unbelievably, she has no idea what she’s about to go through. When she realises with a jolt that there are no more stages after stage four, she decides she wants to opt out, to the horror of her nurse and fellow patients.
The way Gov explores the disease is a little incongruous: the three old hands are hoping to stamp their tumours into oblivion, but by having Carrie argue eloquently and passionately against prolonging her life only to feel and look like utter shit, she undermines them. It’s something addressed in the piece, but not very well.
This is a play which takes a long time to say not an awful lot. There are some exceptionally funny moments and director Guy Retallack manages the jumps into the wacky song numbers well, with the help of Richard Williamson’s atmospheric, blood-red lighting. But the scenes when weird shit isn’t going down are a bit weak.
‘Happy Ending’ is bit of a mess, but still. There’s an admirable chutzpah in the way it tells cancer to go fuck itself.