Hope Has a Happy Meal (NHB Modern Plays)

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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. The People’s Republic of Koka Kola is a dystopian capitalist cess pit – a country which used to be a democracy and is now dominated by the most powerful brands representing the most extreme form of capitalism.

When Hope befriends Isla, a young woman raising her baby nephew, the two quickly find themselves on the run. Lor is angry with Hope because she feels betrayed and abandoned when Hope left — and 24 years is a long time to wait for reconciliation. And there is a lot to enjoy in Lucy Morrison’s energetic and often funny production, whose set by Naomi Dawson is versatile enough to host what is in effect a Thelma-and-Louise-style road movie lit up by the neon glare of American culture, with a kinda Big Lebowski vibe. The central image of a quest by assorted misfits who, despite some bouts of bad temper or depression, are shown to be good people (more or less) suggests the play’s politics of small-scale resistance.Laura Checkley’s Hope is comfortingly normal pitched against the absurdity of the People’s Republic, and her comic timing charming. It's an opening that works by holding its nerve, building up the humour by leaving us not knowing where it’s going. 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. Not only has he heard it before, he says it’s less funny because she’s changed one of the names to hers.

However, the play loses momentum when the group reaches the now-defunct commune, meeting Hope’s sister, Lor (Amaka Okafor). Sign up to unlock our digital magazines and also receive the latest news, events, offers and partner promotions. I also like the psychological insights, expressed perhaps most directly in the clown game show sequence, and the drunken episode when Hope and Lor get plastered. The playtext has subtle references to the long tradition of new writing, by Caryl Churchill, Sarah Kane and Simon Stephens — as well more recent plays by Alistair McDowall and Rory Mullarkey. In the Upstairs studio space, we arrive in the People’s Republic of Koka Kola, formerly the UK, a hilariously lurid police state where freedoms are acutely curtailed and consumer capitalism is totally dominant.Bread Ahead may be most famous for scrumptious, and incredibly Instagram friendly, doughnuts, but also has a incredible variety of top notch bread and pastries on offer. She dominates scenes in the most unsuspecting of ways, empathy and sincerity etched across her face. Perhaps its strongest message is about community togetherness and the power of people, though it never doubles down. In this Happy Meal dystopia, everything – from cities, to train lines, to armies – is owned and branded by big corporations.