Bittersweet comedy at Warwick Arts Centre disturbs the rhetoric

WE Hope That You’re Happy (Why Would We Lie?) is a bittersweet comedy with a punch. Two people appear alone on stage. They’re best friends – or are they? They’re happy – or are they? They have lives that are full and satisfying – or are they?

The play is reminiscent of Samuel Beckett. No plot of course, no story, just movement through a number of scenes related to the audience or to each other. Childhood adventures, picnics and natural and man-made disasters do the progress of the two people through their abstract landscape. The play moves in cycles, punctuated by music to which the couple frantically dance. They try to find things with which to enjoy themselves. They drink beer, stuff themselves with popcorn, suck ice-lollies, eat ketchup, soak themselves in water. They talk about their travels and the horrors they’ve seen. Each pointless activity demands their whole-hearted attention - for a while.

We Hope That You’re Happy (Why Would We Lie?) is a prose poem on stage. The point, if it has one, is to disturb the rhetoric we habitually use to make meaning and comfort in our lives. How can we go out and get wasted when real people are starving?

Were the play to rely only on its message, it would be tedious indeed, an adolescent rant against the unfairness and misery of it all. But it is more complicated than that. There is warmth, humour and a sense of yearning within the rapport between the two characters that is hard to ignore.

Nick Le Mesurier