ajhlovestheatre

(THIS IS NOT A) HAPPY ROOM

by Rosie Day

directed by Hannah Price

King’s Head Theatre, London – until 27 April 2025

running time: 90 minutes, no interval

https://kingsheadtheatre.com/whats-on/14/by-rosie-day/this-is-not-a-happy-room

Writer and actor Rosie Day won popular and critical acclaim for her (almost) solo show Instructions For A Teenage Armageddon in which she tackled the repercussions of abuse and the sheer bloody awfulness of being a hormone-crazed youth struggling to connect. Now she’s back with even more potentially relatable trauma but this time via a fractured family united for a wedding that swiftly, and implausibly, turns into a funeral, in a ninety minute tragicomedy that frustrates as much as it delights.

(This Is Not A) Happy Room gets off to a cracking start. Day (in a performance not dissimilar to what she delivered in her earlier show), Jonny Weldon and Andrea Valls play a trio of bickering siblings gathered together in a hideous Blackpool hotel to “celebrate” their Dad’s wedding (there’s some conjecture as to whether it’s his third or fourth) to a younger woman. The writing’s combination of gallows humour and barely suppressed venom suggests an acidic modern Ayckbourn at work. If Day’s characters are more collections of neuroses and symptoms than fully fledged humans, the performances are engaging enough and the zingers funny enough that it’s hardly noticeable….at first. 

Where the wheels start to come off is when the script seeks to make serious points about the long term effects of childhood abandonment with the arrival of the grown-up children’s mother (Amanda Abbington doing sterling work in an underwritten role). The humour gives way to a tsunami of psychobabble that instead of illuminating the characters, instead serves to make them more self-absorbed, and strangely less convincing. Even less believable is the way an upcoming wedding is repurposed with barely any notice into a funeral, and the arrival of the bride-to-be’s cousin (Jazz Jenkins, sparky), who conveniently works in mental health and is somehow dating Weldon’s chronic hypochondriac son. 

There’s often something bleakly funny about a family in turmoil, as long as it isn’t your own, and Day clearly understands that, but there’s an unbridgeable gulf between the comic writing and the less successful, more serious stuff. So, despite the energised efforts of the actors in Hannah Price’s pacy production, the play becomes more laboured as it draws on and the characters reveal themselves to be less and less likable. The show ends on a particularly heartless bombshell, which I won’t reveal here, that leaves a nasty taste in the mouth but neither illuminates nor enhances anything we’ve seen before, especially as these individuals are pretty hard to care about.

Some sections work well however, such as when Day’s actress daughter Rosie starts a funeral eulogy that, to the appalled amazement of herself as much as the other bewildered guests and participants, turns unstoppably into a recital of the lyrics to Steps/the Bee Gee’s pop hit ‘Tragedy’. Or the wildly inappropriate (under the circumstances) references to Philip Larkin’s ‘This Be The Verse’: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad”. Watch also Abbington’s hilariously uncomfortable physical reaction to the news that the interloper into the family gathering is a therapist (“I don’t believe in therapy”). There’s endearing work from Tom Kanji as the elder daughter’s goofy husband and, in a professional debut at an advanced age, Alison Liney as a benignly unaware great aunt in the grip of dementia, although one can’t help but wish Day’s writing around this tricky subject was a little more nuanced.

Ultimately, this is an undemanding bit of theatre, made watchable by the work of a bunch of consummate professionals. But as a piece of writing it feels like it’s several drafts away from being a decent play.