ON PLAY HOPE HAS A HAPPY MEAL

HOW ARE YOU FEELING ABOUT OPENING NIGHT?

Surprisingly calm, actually. Because the process of writing this play took such a long time, I feel confident I’ve written what I wanted to write and trust the brilliant cast and creative team to deliver it. Then again, I’m sure I’ll be bricking it on the actual night.

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

It’s a sort of magical realist fairy tale about a woman called Hope travelling to the People’s Republic of Koka Kola to find the family she left behind 24 years ago. So, in other words, it’s about ‘hope’ trying to come back. It’s definitely political and very dark at times but there’s also lots of light and love.

WHAT DOES MCDONALD’S HAVE TO DO WITH IT?

Around the time I was thinking about writing a play about hope I read that during the Spanish Civil War abandoned churches, which were seen as symbols of the Right, were used as bases by the Left. That got me thinking about what would be the equivalent now and I landed on the idea of McDonald’s. It’s this thought that gave me the title and final image of the play.

WHY THE FICTIONAL COUNTRY?

In early drafts I was actually trying to do the Sarah Kane thing of creating an unspecified world, like in Cleansed, but I could never get it to work. Then when Shaun Bailey was running for London mayor I read that, at the same time that he opposed the taking down of statues of slave traders in order to ‘preserve history’, he supported allowing the corporate sponsorship of London underground stations, meaning you could feasibly have stations named after companies. This gave me the idea to set the play in the People’s Republic of Koka Kola, which ultimately gives the world of the play more specificity and allows the tone to be more versatile.

WHAT QUESTIONS DOES HOPE HAS A HAPPY MEAL ASK?

It asks questions about the necessity of hope, about its power but also about its cost. It also asks questions about the way the world is currently run and the need to change this.

HOW DID YOU CREATE THE CHARACTER OF HOPE?

At the beginning Hope was less of a character in her own right and more of a cypher. Lucy Morrison (associate director at the Royal Court) and I joke that early drafts of the play were just Hope walking into different places and being hopeful. I think what made it come alive was when she became a more flawed character –that’s a more accurate representation of hope.

It’s beautiful and powerful but unreliable. It can lift you up but it can tear you down just as easily.

£ Hope has a Happy Meal is on at the Royal Court from 3 June

Making the intimacy disappear is more than just bad for the feels, it’s also problematic given a major purpose of LGBTQ drama is to platform intimacy and break taboos around seeing people of the same sex together.

Elsewhere, there’s a comedic tone that sometimes works, but most often doesn’t. In the only scene where we see the couple in bed having sex, the tone is promptly lightened by Jack cracking a bad joke, which rips away the tension, and the chemistry, from beneath our feet.

It feels as though Butterell has tried to mimic the film version with much of the staging but added humour in place intimacy.

The production reminds me of the

Young Vic’s adaptation of Oklahoma! from last year, where the musicians on stage, who occasionally join in with the storytelling, add a meta element to the story.

But where Oklahoma made time for deep dives into the characters’ emotions, with scenes that lingered over conversations in real time, Brokeback Mountain feels like it was unable to work out how to stage the essential intimacy, so it just got rid of it.

There are some commendable efforts to reinvent this story for the stage:

Paul Hickey is compelling as Older Ennis, forever sitting on the side lines and nostalgically gazing at his younger self. But overall this queer coupling feels starved of queer romance.