Get Happy
Omnibus Theatre • 1st - 12th July
It was way back in February 2023 that I first saw Joseph Aldous perform his accomplished debut Get Happy at The Pleasence Theatre. Now, in 2025 he revisits the piece, this time bringing it to Clapham’s Omnibus Theatre for their 96 Festival, a short season celebrating queer-led and queer focussed work.
Despite having already reviewed the show two and a half years ago, my memory was a bit hazy due to the passing of time as well as the number of plays I’d reviewed in the interim. That being said, I do remember commenting that the production’s first outing was ‘An incredibly strong debut from Joseph Aldous’, having awarded it four stars. (Original review here). That recollection was sparked by happily discovering the quote had been used on the promotional material for this latest outing. However, I decided not to go back to re-familiarising myself with that original review having made the conscious decision to see this production through as fresh a pair of eyes as possible.
Unsurprisingly, the plays story remains the same, Adam (Aldous) finds himself at a crossroads, watching all his friends move on with their lives, whilst his own has become somewhat stuck in a rut, prompting him to try and turn things around. All he has to do is follow a ‘simple’ three-point plan. Hold down a job, pay his increasingly late rent, and find himself a more meaningful relationship…. oh yes, and dance! Aided and abetted by a seemingly sentient, not to mention omnipresent Alexa, (who finds it easier to hand out lifestyle advice than to fulfil Adam’s one simple request to play ‘C’Mon’ by Kesha), Adam is convinced he can not only get himself happy… but that his happiness can be even greater than those around him. Not such an easy task when he is measuring his own happiness against those he perceives as being happy around him.
Along with the story at the core of the play, the staging also remains intact from the previous production, adhering to the old adage, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’, and whilst it’s still deceptively simple, Aldous and director Piers Black are able to extract a lot of impact from their two main pieces of set, a large circular neon light that is the physical embodiment of Adam’s increasingly caustic Alexa, and three vertical strip-lights used to visually represent the three goals Adam must achieve in order to get happy! Though the rest of the stage remains empty, it is more than compensated for by Anna Short’s sound design and Jonathan Chan’s lighting which accent various parts of Aldous’s story with such impressive precision that they almost feel like a piece of physical set in themselves.
Whilst extremely funny, Get Happy is punctuated by Aldous’s altogether more sobering observations about the darker side of pursuing quick fixes in pursuit of long-time happiness. As a performer Aldous has both charm and wit to comfortably carry the audience through both, seen at his most in control when he breaks out of the narrative to make a quip about his phones unfeasibly long battery life given the duration of the plays timeline. It’s a brave ‘aside’ made during one of the plays darker moments, and in a less skilled performers hands this could have jolted the audience so far out of the moment that it would have been a tough job to reign them back in as quickly as the story required, but somehow Aldous’s manages to slot his joke in seamlessly, due in part to the rapport he has already worked on building with the audience as soon as they enter the auditorium, Aldous energetically working the room, a ball of energy as eager to share his story as he was two and a half years ago.
It's hard to know exactly what may have been tweaked in the intervening years. There is a reference about AI that has been slipped in which is interesting given just how absurd his vision of a sentient Alexa may have seemed two and a half years ago and how less remarkable it now seems with the advent of Chat GBT. Maybe Aldous is as much a prophet as he is a playwright but, with this apparent ability to predict the future aside, this latest production of Get Happy certainly feels even sharper than before. Admittedly Aldous has now lived with the piece for quite a while, which may go some way in explaining just how comfortable he appears performing the piece, but there is definitely more to it than that. Everything about the show has been honed to perfection, which has unfortunately rendered Jack The Lad’s quote on the current promotional material a tad out of date given that Get Happy is now definitely a five-star show with a five-star performance from the writer/actor. It will definitely be very interesting to see what Aldous will turn his attention to next.
★★★★★
Get Happy is on at the Omnibus Theatre until 12th July. Tickets available here
review: Simon J. Webb