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Inventive new play ‘Hope has a Happy Meal’ at the Royal Court starts out strong. 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. She seemingly delivers it well. When the punchline arrives, we laugh. But he’s unimpressed. Not only has he heard it before, he says it’s less funny because she’s changed one of the names to hers. It's an opening that works by holding its nerve, building up the humour by leaving us not knowing where it’s going. The rest of the play struggles to match its effortless freewheeling wit.
Via Hope, writer Tom Fowler drops us into Satire Land – or, more precisely, the People’s Republic of Koka Kola. In this Happy Meal dystopia, everything – from cities, to train lines, to armies – is owned and branded by big corporations. With much trepidation, Hope is returning to Koka Kola, after decades away, to reunite with her sister and someone else she left behind years ago. But her visit becomes considerably more dramatic after she meets waitress Isla (Mary Malone) – who’s fleeing with her baby nephew from his father, a police officer who she says killed her sister – and a suicidal, soon-to-be-former park ranger, Alex (Nima Taleghani). They band together to find a fabled commune run by Hope’s sister.
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. Director Lucy Morrison and designer Naomi Dawson give these opening scenes an effectively crazed, funhouse air, with a primary-coloured set and a gameshow wheel. This comes into play when a guilt-stricken Hope dreams about an uncannily familiar red, white and yellow clown – complete with hilariously bleeped out name – aggressively judging her failings. It’s all effectively unsettling. With some well-judged cameo characters also providing heightened jabs at the slick emptiness of the service industry, played by the cast in sometimes triple duty (including a particularly versatile Felix Scott), Fowler’s playfully dark humour hits the spot.
However, the play loses momentum when the group reaches the now-defunct commune, meeting Hope’s sister, Lor (Amaka Okafor). The surrealism fades away in favour of family confrontations that slide into melodrama. We linger a little too long around the same table. There are strong performances from the exceptional cast – with Okafor and Checkley bringing a bruising weight to their angry, fractured relationship – but a lingering sense of sameyness sets in until, inevitably, everything goes catastrophically pear-shaped. Nevertheless, Fowler never loses his finely tuned sense of humour, leavening out the more overwrought moments with a welcome wryness. It’s an imaginative, often engrossing ride.