(This is not a) Happy Room at King’s Head Theatre – review

It takes a special level of disgruntlement with your parents to start quoting Philip Larkin’s This Be The Verse to strangers. That poem that begins, “They f*** you up, your mum and dad,” and ends with the warning: “Get out as early as you can / And don’t have any kids yourself”. But Elle, attending her dad’s third wedding (or maybe fourth, who’s really counting anymore?) has reached Larkin levels. And so have her siblings, Simon and Laura.

As Rosie Day’s twisty family drama unfolds, we watch the Henderson children grapple with the rotten fruits of their parents’ failures. Individual neuroses clash, childhood dynamics resurface involuntarily, even after years apart. And once the wedding unexpectedly becomes a funeral, the emotional baggage is well and truly unzipped – dirty laundry flying across the drab Blackpool function room.

Day’s script is smart and incisive with a steady stream of cracking jokes and some moments of real emotional candour. Its zippy pace slows towards the end ­– there are perhaps a few too many twists and painful pasts to fit into 90 minutes – but it does do one thing masterfully: siblings.

Sibling relationships are the uncanny valley of theatre. We understand their unique joys and exasperations so deeply that we can spot immediately if they’re off by so much as a smirk or a nickname. With the help of Hannah Price’s energetic direction, the siblings duff each other up and dress each other down, pick mercilessly at old wounds and console each other with dance breaks.

The cast are excellent. Andrea Valls is deliciously uptight as eldest child Laura, forced to mother her younger siblings as a teenager (to much resentment all round), and now struggling with her own newborn. Jonny Weldon’s snarky hypochondriac Simon is the comedic heart of the show, and Day is suitably flighty as a famous actress and the baby of the bunch.

Tom Kanji as Laura’s husband Charles, and Jazz Jenkins as Hayley, a distant relative on the bride’s side, make for perfect outsiders. Charles mis-steps constantly while trying to find his place within this bonkers brood, and Hayley observes them all with the kind of benevolent incredulity you might feel for an X-Factor contestant with delusions of talent.

Amanda Abbington plays the siblings’ emotionally constipated mother Esther – “this is a tear-free zone”. But as the laxative effects of the funeral take effect, we learn about the roots of her coldness, and a bigger conversation opens up about the suffering of mothers, and the misogyny that underpins so much of it. Abbington balances Esther’s impossible choices and feminist unrepentance beautifully.

Her revelations, combined with stories about her ex-husband’s own childhood, bring to mind another line from Larkin’s poem. How are parents “were f***ed up in their turn / By fools in old-style hats and coats”. And as the family disperses, that’s the best they have by way of resolution. Nobody is forgiven, painful patterns will repeat, wounds will continue to gape. It feels bleak. It also feels refreshing.