Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
Cast: Ian Cook, Adam Davies, Eleni Edupidi, Jennifer Essex.
Like convenience food, happiness is pre-packaged, put on a shelf and marketed, it is what everybody desires, everybody grasps for, fights over and goes out of their way to show to the world that they have seen a fleeting glimpse of it as the show an endless parade of pictures of their life on social media; happiness is no longer a cigar, it is an emotion that becomes more flawed and cracked the higher life takes you, for like money, the more you have, the more you need to keep the thrill going.
Happiness is understood, it is a pleasure, an emotion captured by the sensational physical theatre company Tmesis with incredible results, beautifully arranged routines that the great Elinor Randle directs with passion and a script that is divine and spot on. Happiness is patrolled, it is how it is sold to you, to stimulate you which is the point in Happy Hour.
Happy Hour is the mania of the office environment, it is where the race to gain that extra smiling face, neatly laminated on a badge, pinned to the chest like a medal commemorating war, is to be fought over. Happiness cannot be measured but it can, thanks to the creative of mind of writer Chris Fittock, be used as a statistic and urged to show the world just how happy you are.
What Tmesis do in their usual incredible way is to show the absurdity of happiness, the abundance of people willing to fake it, to urge others to be happy when arguably the reality is that to revel in the mayhem, to be slightly anarchistic and melancholic is a more natural state of mind, that to be permanently happy is to be easily controlled, that chasing that ever-lasting smile is a fallacy that leads to personal destruction.
Tmesis yet again have scored a direct hit with their performance, outstanding choreography, the writing and delivery of a script that is the essence of capturing a human emotion and one that is, for an hour, something that really makes you happy to be part of; a performance of spectacle and true quality.
Ian D. Hall