About Happy Now?

• a note from the artistic director
• Who's happy now?
• England's dreaming

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Who's happy now?

 

Though Lucinda Coxon may be a new name for many US theatergoers, the playwright has a busy stage and screen career at home. Her 2002 film The Heart of Me garnered acting awards in the UK for two of its stars, Paul Bettany and Olivia Williams. In addition to the National Theatre, where Happy Now? premiered on the Cottlesloe Stage this past winter, her plays have been produced by the Bush Theatre, Soho Theatre, and the Royal Court. Stateside, her plays Nostalgia and Vesuvius were produced by California’s South Coast Rep. Her newest film Wild Target, with a cast that includes Bill Nighy, Emily Blunt, and Rupert Grint, has just begun shooting in London. With another commission underway for the National, and more film and television projects in the works, she shows no signs of slowing down.

Happy Now? opens with a joke, so it’s no surprise Coxon calls it a work about the death of optimism. “It’s a very confrontational play,” she says. “It invites viewers to get on board, but that device also says,‘Watch out because you are in this play. You will see yourself very shortly.’”

Coxon’s characters, drawn from her generation, have what she calls “impeccable liberal credentials”: a group who voted for Tony Blair’s Labour government, and then marched against the invasion of Iraq; who live in the city, but worry that they can’t find a decent school for their children.

A closely observed comment on the manners and mores of her peers,
Happy Now? chronicles “the ‘reality bites’ moment, where you have to grow up,” she says. “It’s not like an episode of Friends anymore; you’re not spilling in and out of each other’s houses, living in this endlessly extendable adolescence.” As her characters’ children long to be grown up and their parents enter second childhood, Coxon deftly sketches the realities of a generation—perhaps belatedly—coming of age.

—Sarah Bishop-Stone
Production Dramaturg