Happy Meal

Tabby Lamb’s play is a slow burning rom com between two transitioning English teenagers who barely meet each other.  IRL, that is: in real life.

Moving from teens to adulthood, these Gen Zers stay talking in the safe space of social media platforms; they kick off with Club Penguin and MySpace and transition onto FaceBook, Skype and finally self-created digital worlds free from outside mockery. 

Lamb plays with this profound topicality – our concern today with sexual and transgender identities and the simultaneous explosion of a diversity in social media.

The middleclass Alec (an engaging Sam Crerar) seems more confident in his transitioning as he moves from school to student life; Bette (Tommi Bryson) is so delighted that Alec doesn’t know her as transgender that she stays clinging to that digital world she can manipulate. 

They start as kids shouting out their fav films and songs, but these English teenagers don’t go on to offer much interest or insight into their transitioning experience, a reticence that continues into their more adult conversation.   Lamb doesn’t bite many bullets.

Alec and Bette enthusiastically communicate from two booths or clouds facing the audience, with words projected onto the front as on screens.  This inventive, modest setting from designer Ben Stones makes for easy travels by this visiting production from Theatre Royal Plymouth, but it remains a barrier to more intimacy and empathy between the two, and between them and us. 

What Jamie Fletcher and her cast achieve is an affectionate affirmation of the path to happiness of transgendered people – and their right to have it – as the opening night audience properly celebrated.

Martin Portus