Fourteen-year-old Eden has been thinking about what she might do when she leaves school. She asked her mum, who told her: “I just want you to be happy.” But what is happiness? When I say I’m happy, does that mean I’m feeling what you’re feeling when you say you’re happy?
A group of young people from the Roundhouse, together with neuroscientists and psychologists, endeavour to find out in a piece created in collaboration with Glas(s) Performance and Emma Higham. It draws on personal experience, academic research and an experiment with a bacon sandwich. There is a moment towards the end when a teenager and an older woman play the drums together and their pleasure and total abandon is so infectious that my levels of happiness rocketed.
Increasingly, some of the most interesting theatre is being made by and with young people, and this show is part of that trend, even if it only really finds real focus in individual moments: most notably in the story of a young woman being priced out of university, the area she has always called home and effectively her own future. The Happiness Project doesn’t quite find a way to address the question raised in its programme: why there are such low levels of reported happiness by UK teenagers compared with many in the industrialised world.
The experts don’t feel entirely integrated into the performance, and unlike the young people they are sometimes a bit arch, as if acutely aware that they are performing. But there is an exquisite moment when an elderly scientist and a young boy sit side by side and a long ago memory is retrieved. Was that happiness? Or has memory burnished it? In a sense the performance itself – ephemeral, elusive and mysterious – is a reflection of the impossibility of defining happiness and capturing it. The more you pursue it, the harder it is to catch.
- At the Roundhouse, London, until 14 November. Box office: 0300-6789 222.
