Theatre

Happy Hour

Oran Mor, Glasgow

Mary Brennan

FOUR STARS

Publican Joe, is in his usual place at the head of the table – or rather, his ashes are. The fact that they’re in a wonky old shoe-box slyly suggests Happy Hour – a first play from Anita Vettesse, directed by Gethin Evans – will prove a black comedy, even though there’s nothing funny about the family meltdown that ensues when it comes to the money that’s on the table (as it were) with Joe’s remains.

Maybe Vetesse’s own highly successful career on-stage has nurtured an instinct, and an ear, for what really hits the mark, not just in comedy but in believable drama. It helps, of course, that Happy Hour has a cast that understands comic timing and can also tell the difference between obvious stereotype and nuanced reality. Daughter Kay, for instance, is yet again in a quagmire of debt and aspirational delusions: she needs her share of the money to survive, so she hectors and wails and clypes on her brother Tom about his life in Africa – anything to prise a cheque from her mother.

Kay could be a one-note whinger, but Hannah Donaldson shows us the hurt, immature child she still is – albeit with a barbed tongue in her head. She probably got that from her mother. Anne Lacey’s shrewd, controlling widow is wickedly caustic – Vettesse hands her some brilliant put-downs – but again, there’s another, needy, side to her that emerges in her exchanges with the briefly returned Tom (Stephen McCole). She’d assumed he was home for good... Time and again, you just have to laugh: the dialogue is too sharp, too full of hilariously venomous point-scoring not to – but the punch-lines are never at the expense of the underlying griefs that this dysfunctional family simply can’t bury or forgive.

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