Bath’s Next Stage are taking on Lucinda Coxon’s tale of a stressed working mum who suddenly gets a new perspective on her life. Steve Wright juggles his priorities.

It’s a nice irony that the very people for whom ‘Happy Now?’ – Lucinda Coxon’s play about stress, fidelity and the claustrophobic demands of family and professional life – would resonate the loudest, are probably those too busy, stressed or knackered to make it to the theatre in the first place.

Still, those that can manage to shut up the laptop and install the babysitter for a few short hours should make a beeline for Bath’s Mission Theatre, where in-house company Next Stage are giving the play its Bath premiere next week. Produced at the National Theatre in 2008 and given a New York run last autumn, Coxon’s play centres on Kitty, a multi-tasking mum who lives with her teacher husband and their two children, battles with a high-powered job and an unsympathetic mother, and finds herself at full stretch when expected to provide support and sympathy to her best friends as their marriage unravels. Worn down by the demands on her time and energy, Kitty remarks wistfully: “I’m everything to everyone. Sometimes I get excited at the thought of being nothing to someone for twenty minutes.”

A chance meeting at a conference with Michael, a smooth-talking delegate, forces Kitty to reassess her life and address the “What if?” questions that are raised by his overtures. Alongside her exhausted teacher husband Johnny and her self-absorbed mother June, the other characters orbiting around Kitty include Miles and Bea, her best friends now struggling through alcoholism and impending divorce, and Carl, her gay lawyer friend searching for love and happiness.

“I saw ‘Happy Now?’ when it was performed at the Cottesloe Theatre in London and thought it was a very funny, witty and insightful take on the ‘I'm married with kids – what am I doing, where am I going, is this it?’ late 30s/early 40s epiphany,” explains Next Stage’s suitably tireless director Ann Garner. “There’s laughter and reality in equal measure and, as with all good plays, you are left wanting to know what happens next in the protagonists’ lives.”

Ann found herself disagreeing with a number of critics who dismissed the play as a sitcom. “I felt it raised real issues and looked at real lives without descending into trite, tired scenarios. It’s hard when dealing with modern life, love and related matters to find anything new to say, but Lucinda Coxon holds up a light which illuminates familiar issues and throws accepted behaviour patterns into sharp relief, encouraging audiences to examine their own values and judgements.” 

Does Coxon have any sort of agenda – to highlight the sanctity of family life, perhaps, or, conversely, to subvert it? Or does she just want to show us how difficult and various modern life can be? “I suspect the latter, because she doesn't provide answers and she doesn't judge. Even the opportunistic Michael justifies his behaviour, and there is implicit sympathy for the divorcing couple, despite there being children caught up in their parents’ decision.” And is Kitty led into temptation with Michael? And if so, does Coxon manage to retain audiences’ sympathies for her heroine? “You’ll have to see the play to find out!”

After its 2008 National Theatre debut (NT director Nicholas Hytner described it as having “created for our audiences that frisson of shared experience: it was always exciting to stand at the back and hear the gasps of recognition”), ‘Happy Now?’ then made its US debut last winter at the Yale Repertory Theater. Coxon, a 47-year-old playwright from Derby who headed off to California in the 1990s to escape a culture of “subconscious misogyny” in British theatre, has been busy since her return to the UK. Last year her 30-minute play ‘The Eternal Not’ opened at the National as a companion piece to ‘All’s Well That Ends Well’. She’s also adapted Michel Faber's Victorian-set psychological thriller ‘The Crimson Petal and The White’ for BBC2 (coming soon), and has seen her screen version of David Ebershoff's novel ‘The Danish Girl’ (about the world's first male-to-female sex-change operation) taken up by Nicole Kidman and director Tomas Alfredson (‘Let the Right One In’).

Coxon has been writing for theatre and cinema since she left Oxford in 1984: ‘Happy Now?’, though, was her breakthrough. She wrote the play very quickly, she recalls, based on what, as a new mother, she was seeing around her. “So many people were trying, often desperately, to manage working parenthood, and frankly going round the bend, clinging on but never saying. The thing about raising children is that the years are short but the days can be long.

“These people were tired and angry, and somehow having to come to terms not just with the less palatable obligations of family life, but also a wider sense of failure in their lives that was to do with the social and political landscape, the end of New Labour. And that story was nowhere to be found on stage.”

HAPPY NOW? MISSION THEATRE, BATH, TUE 26-SAT 30 OCT.
 

Copyright Steve Wright 2010

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