Happy Now?
From: Wednesday, 16th January 2008
To: Saturday, 10 May 2008
Our Review: 
Your Reviews:
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Synopsis
A chance encounter at a conference hotel plays upon Kitty’s mind as she struggles to balance personal freedom with family life, fidelity and a testing job. Her husband seems more interested in misplaced apostrophes than his marriage, her parents are looking down the barrel of oblivion and, although she might toy with joining a gym, Kitty’s running out of time for big changes.
Our Review:
25 January 2008
The staple English middle-class domestic comedy is being quietly re-born in the National’s Cottesloe while War Horse (to which there is far less than meets the eye, I now reckon) and Much Ado About Nothing grab the headlines on the big stage. After last year’s underrated The Five Wives of Maurice Pinder, Lucinda Coxon’s Happy Now? proves there really is life after Ayckbourn.
Everything about the play rings with a horrible truth, and the writing is consistently funny and flecked with pain. Thea Sharrock’s smart production is a feast of good acting, too, with a superb cast led by the willowy Olivia Williams as Kitty, a charity worker fraught with family worries. Her teacher husband Johnny (Jonathan Cullen) doesn’t kiss her any more. Her self-centred mother June (blithe, batty and beatific Anne Reid) is no consolation.
Her unseen sister is dying...
Latest User Review
David Baxter - 7 May 2008:
For male theatregoers Happy Now is probably not the best choice of play to go to with your partner unless you are incredibly secure in your relationship. Lucinda Coxon's perceptive comedy will provoke several moments of uncomfortable recognition and will probably lead to an "interesting" conversation on the way home. Alongside three husbans of varying degree of awfulness the only sympathetic male character is Stuart McQuarrie's gay best friend Carl - Will to Kitty's Grace. However, in the quest for a woman to "have it all" Coxon gives the best line to Stuart Townsend's preyor on married women who gives Kitty permission to be happy....
Cast
Olivia Williams (Kitty)
Jonathan Cullen (Johnny)
Emily Joyce (Bea)
Anne Reid (June)
Dominic Rowan (Miles)
Stanley Townsend (Michael)
Creative
Lucinda Coxon (Author)
National Theatre (Producer)
Thea Sharrock (Director)
Jonathan Fensom (Design)
Oliver Fenwick (Lighting)
Paul Arditti (Sound)
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