Review: HEN by Josh Husselbee at The Hope Theatre 7-15 June 2022

‘this ambitious story takes on grief, privilege and class satire’ ★★★

A flat in Shoreditch is the principal setting for Josh Husselbee’s Hen. Alister (George Fletcher) shows up on the doorstep of his friend Andrew (Oliver Lyndon), though Alister’s been absent for six months recovering from a drug overdose. To add to that, Alister’s come straight from his mother’s funeral and his late mum has left him the hen of the title: he explains he has to keep it alive for a year as a character-building exercise to inherit £1.2m accumulated from his family’s sprawling farming empire. Alister promises Andrew a cut if he helps him with the task.

What follows is a year in 70 minutes of stage time. It’s technically a two-hander, though additional characters cameo in different ways. Fletcher and Lyndon give committed performances and clearly have fun with Husselbee’s dialogue, amped-up emotions and pacey writing.

The ambitious story takes on grief, privilege and class satire, but the often entertaining pace of the script feels like a bit of a smokescreen for characters who are tricky to root for. Alister is consumed with grief over the loss of the mother who openly disliked him. What he lacks is the emotional toolkit to process his complicated feelings. He responds by squabbling with Andrew and blackmailing his way into a job at a company run by his own father, before treating his colleagues appallingly and sliding into psychosis with the belief that the hen is a reincarnation of his mother. Andrew is really not much of a friend, persistently distracted by materialistic concerns and his rotating roster of lovers.

Much of each character’s emotional journey is played – often jarringly – as comic beats. Hen scrabbles with tone, its comic aspirations sitting uneasily with its darker story themes. We get rat-a-tat dialogue and the occasional fun farce of the hen’s antics, and we’re invited to laugh as Alister blusters his way through his grief, enabled by his privilege and the largely self-centred Andrew. Husselbee dabbles with class satire, particularly in a party scene where his protagonists quietly ridicule their ‘friends’ emotional repression from afar while clearly failing to deal with their own wrenching issues. But it feels odd being asked to laugh with these two characters who more often feel tragic than funny and quickly become the joint villains of their own story: real comedy appeal becomes thinner.

The hen-as-reincarnated-mother plot point is immediately rooted in the ridiculous and has limited comedy value to begin with as it’s clearly nonsense. But it’s embraced as a key driver of the second half of the story, partly because Andrew chooses to humour Alister’s obsession. Where the story could have shifted to interrogate Alister’s grief with more grounded insight – and perhaps a clearer dramatic point of view – we instead get laboured gags about the hen’s eggs being Alister’s unborn siblings.

There are just the two physical performers but more than half a dozen supporting characters. This is laudably ambitious but only partially successful: some of these characters have pre-recorded voices, while in other scenes the actors awkwardly interact with thin air.

Hen is worth investigating for its complex themes, even if its bluster quickly gets in the way of deeper insight. 

HEN

The Hope Theatre

Until 15 June

Box office: https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/thehopetheatre/e-lpgyeq

Creative team

Performers: George Fletcher and Oliver Lyndon

Writer: Josh Husselbee

Director: Sarah Fox

Dramaturg: Jacob Casel

Reviewed by Nick Goundry