Some thoughts on 'We Hope That You're Happy' 10 years on
This year is the tenth anniversary of our show We Hope That You’re Happy (Why Would We Lie?). In an anti-nostalgic fashion the world is probably grateful to us for adopting, we’ve missed a couple theoretically bigger anniversaries: Made In China’s ten year birthday, the tenth anniversary of our first show Stationary Excess. Probably fitting for a company formed by a couple who can’t even remember when their own anniversary is. But We Hope That You’re Happy (WHTYH) was a show we made by me and Tim with our Best Collaborator Ever, Christopher Brett Bailey, and he’s one for nostalgia, apparently. He suggested we mark this one. So we have – in some ways that involved him (hold onto your panties boys, a recorded reading of the show is on the way) – as well some ways, like this, that are really just about me (Jess) reflecting on the show, where it came from and what significance it might still have.
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We Hope That You’re Happy was my first and only attempt at trying to express what experiencing 9/11 in person had done to me. Tim was doing the same with the London public transport bombings of ‘7/7’ (2005). I say we experienced these moments, but for both of us it’s always felt a bit questionable to say we actually ‘experienced’ them – generally more accurate to say we witnessed them as citizens of the places they happened in. This uneasy straddling of the experiencing/witnessing faultline is the same strange halfway point of contemporary existence that all our theatre tries to explore.
We started making the show in late 2010. I’d come to the UK 3 years previously to escape a life in New York that was frankly messy and bordering on dangerously unhealthy. I’d been in New York since starting university in the city a week before 9/11. I saw the planes hit the towers in real time, restarted uni once the dust literally settled, and then basically went on a gradual slide over a number of years into a self-destructively hedonistic lifestyle that I was so desperate to get away from that I agreed to move to a lousy English town with a lousy English boyfriend in 2007. That relationship died as Made In China was born. I was in London by then, uncertain if I was staying, pining for New York whilst knowing it didn’t make sense to go back.
As we started making WHTYH, we talked a lot about the combination of party-party lifestyle and seismic world event that seemed to encapsulate my years in New York. You feel like you’re quite a close witness to a huge deadly explosive event like 9/11, and then a more distant witness (although you get just as many close-up replays) to a series of often deadlier, bigger, more awful fall-out moments that follow on from it. It felt impossible to separate what happened in the years following 9/11 – the devastation of the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq, the re-election of GW Bush, increased right-wing nationalism, Guantanamo - from what happened on that day. Despite the fact that I saw the first plane hit as I walked along a Manhattan street, and then watched from my dorm window as people jumped from the burning towers, it felt impossible to separate the things I witnessed from what I saw on the news most days.
20 years on from 9/11, I still find it difficult to sort through how what happened affected me. I was 18 and I’d thrown myself into this monster of a city where I knew no-one. I was depressed, had an ongoing eating disorder and found social situations to induce a jumble of deep comfort and uncontrollable anxiety in me. Heading into my freshman year, I thought I knew what I wanted from my life; I had applied to NYU early and assuredly told them at my audition that I knew exactly what acting course I wanted to be on. But by that Tuesday, 9 months later, after a freshers-week full of awkward drinks with film bros I would never speak to again and hating the method acting track so much that I did a last-minute switch to one that encompassed directing, design and producing along with performing, because it was the only one that had space, I stopped feeling sure. I felt lost in that moment. It’s a feeling that still follows me. So, I’m kind of, very belatedly, reconsidering my decades-long assumption that witnessing 9/11 didn’t have any direct link to my own struggles. Maybe making WHTYH was the start of that slow reconsideration, beginning to engage with the ickiness of identifying in some way as one of the ‘victims’ of something I was just a witness to. I didn’t know anyone who died personally, just knew people who knew people. In the following months and years, I wasn’t living in or from a country that was treated to the constant bombing, invasions and never-ending wars that followed 9/11. I just happened to be there that day.
In that autumn of 2010, starting to make the show, we spent a lot of time thinking about how trauma and depression and distance intermingled. We recalled a a time in the pub, where we were sat with some friends, one of whom was talking about his love-life saga while BBC 24-hour world news was playing footage from floods and mudslides in Pakistan that were killing and displacing masses of people. Our friend, who was talking, looked at the TV and paused before saying ‘that’s so sad’ and then launching back into his story. At that moment, it felt like we were living in the dystopian future we had been promised. We were rolling into the second decade of the twenty first century and it was impossible for us, in what felt like a moment of hyper Western empathy fatigue, to predict how the world was going to change. Obama was president, the UK wasn’t yet fully feeling the effects of the decade of austerity to come, culture wars didn’t feel like a major thing, Brexit was still a wholly fringe idea and social media was still in its early days.
Looking back, some of our very ‘noughties’ thinking that went into the show seems naïve – all the signs of the shitstorm that has been the 2010s were there already. But it’s also really easy with hindsight to say that. To be kind to our younger selves, returning to the show text and footage, there also seems to be some foretelling in it. It’s there in the small things as well as the overarching exploration. As we re-read the script recently, Tim joked that we invented ‘fake news’ as we got to the bit of the show where Chris claims a fact he read on the internet is true, when in reality, it was made up (he says there are 192 bones in the human body, when there are actually 208). Also resonant, in a troubling way, is how the show tapped into the idea that a downwards trajectory might be desirable or inevitable, if everyone goes in that direction together. The austerity of the early 2010s threw up media/politics catchphrases that captured this, such as the ‘race to the bottom’. Perhaps this is grotesquely spoken to in WHTYH by the one-upmanship list of injuries Chris and I had supposedly suffered. Meanwhile at the start of the 2020s we keep hearing about ‘levelling up’, but the dire socio-economic outlook seems to suggestion in fact a levelling down or bottoming out.
There’s a darkly fascinating ambiguity to this language, with the conjuring of fairness and equality at the same time as suffering and deprivation, a kind of ‘we all have to suck it up and be united’ masking extreme division between those who suffer and those who retain privilege and power. WHTYH maybe anticipated this nuance of ambiguity too. The show is quite intensely, grossly, almost shamelessly about privilege. Chris and I list ‘things we have seen’ - ranging from the ultra-epic and historic to the pathetically mundane. It becomes clear which is which, but they’re all delivered deadpan, all treated with the same eerily rose-tinted filter. In the final lines of the show, we deliver a corny shared childhood memory of a drive to a picnic (to contrast the narrated picnics at sites of catastrophe that make up the spine of the show). And then Chris tells the audience that his dream is for everyone to be all together on the same level – even if that meant everyone being sad. It’s a show where we stand there for 45 minutes, drinking beer, eating ice-creams and popcorn, dancing goofily, recounting picnics to scenes of horror, injuries sustained, privileged little childhood memories, dressing up in flour and ketchup to become the walking wounded of whatever deadly explosive reference point you care to imagine. Like the decade that followed it, WHTYH sees people stand isolated from one another, try to connect, chattering into a void so crowded with other sounds it’s hard to be heard, or just vacantly chomping popcorn and staring into space/others’ faces, paralyzed by the fact that no actions have seemed to have made any difference to the speed or direction of the many disasters we are hurtling through.
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WHTYH was technically our second show but wasn’t a tricky second album at all. It was really more of a first album (our first show, the twenty-five minute short sharp shock of Stationary Excess, was more of an EP!). Making WHYTH, we didn’t know what we were doing, didn’t get paid or mentored or anything like that, developed it in on and off for a year via about 15 work-in-progresses (a model that has literally only ever worked for us making this show, and actually created massive struggles for our next two shows), learnt our lines and ‘rehearsed’ in about 24 hours. And then the show was done, and we toured it, very intermittently, for the next 2 years.
We somehow thought that we could just keep making shows like a patchwork quilt – no real structure to the process, no real delineation of roles, no real schedule, just sort of making bits, putting them together in different ways, eventually sewing everything up 20 seconds before the show is meant to premiere. But whilst its exploratory essence has its value, that approach almost never works beyond early stages for us. What had felt fun and organic during the WHTYH process felt fraught, unfocused and frustrating in the shows that followed. Is that what artistic process is? Or is that just what people think artistic process is meant to be, all glorious struggle, fraught collectivity, intensity and angst? Probably because that assumption is kinda bullshit, we never did crack how to make a show like that again. Instead we (eventually) started being clearer about who was doing what, started to recognize that we were not actually a devising company and that we benefit from being able to write ahead of workshop time, and that bigger doesn’t always mean better. I guess this is a kind of growing up.
Meanwhile, a pretty big part of WHTYH was about the self-involved nostalgic privilege of looking back to the happy innocence of our (autofictional characters’) childhoods. Trying to reconcile the world we were told we would live in with the one that actually existed. We were criticizing our own ironic self-awareness and millennial apathy, combined with our desire to shove ourselves into the center of every global narrative, both on a ‘Western’ or Global North societal level and on a personal one. There were uncomfortable colonial legacy overtones to this, and we were aware of that – however naïve we were as recent graduates, we wanted to explore that relative taboo rather than leave it lurking beneath the surface. And we were trying to make something that was fun, and live and entertaining and that let us get drunk while the world burned, even if that’s what we were saying we were criticizing. It was almost certainly annoying, maybe even offensive to some people, that we were trying to criticize what we were actively participating in. But it was our naïve attempt at avoiding a kind of patronizing politicality – to avoid any trace of ‘some people are like this and we’re better than that and they should be too’. An attempt at a kind of honesty, saying ‘we are part of this problem, we don’t have the answers and we don’t excuse ourselves’. It was also an attempt to take theatre a bit closer to popular culture and everyday experience whilst pushing as much as we could at the form.