Sign up to unlock our digital magazines and also receive the latest news, events, offers and partner promotions. In the end I found it playful but not an effective critique of capitalism, nor a particularly hopeful piece about redemption, nor a strong rejection or message about police brutality or domestic abuse.

The play does a decent job at attempting to answer some of those questions, where others are left lingering. In the process she finds not only old family but new friends, and acts of kindness and solidarity along the way.When protagonist Hope lands at Nike International Airport after 24 years abroad, she knows everything has changed.

Laura Checkley’s Hope is comfortingly normal pitched against the absurdity of the People’s Republic, and her comic timing charming. Hope (Laura Checkley) tells a long joke about a frustrated angel caught up in heavenly bureaucracy to the person sitting next to her on her flight. The People’s Republic of Koka Kola is a dystopian capitalist cess pit – a country which used to be a democracy and is now dominated by the most powerful brands representing the most extreme form of capitalism. In the Upstairs studio space, we arrive in the People’s Republic of Koka Kola, formerly the UK, a hilariously lurid police state where freedoms are acutely curtailed and consumer capitalism is totally dominant. The resultant escapade feels part Thelma and Louise, part reverse-Wizard of Oz, and Lucy Morrison’s direction neatly balances the comic beats with darker material, including a nightmarish gameshow hallucination.

That Hope goes on such a visually transformative personal journey in the space of an hour and forty minutes is credit to Checkley’s physical theatre talents, her body absorbing the tension in each scene as we build to the play’s violent crescendo.

Felix Scott gives a panoply of excellent performances, from a brutal cop to a hopeless ex-husband, and there is enough vim and vigour to the production that when Isla announces that “this is, like, the best adventure ever!You will be pleased to know that McDonald’s is referenced about a hundred times, though the Happy Meal toy is never realised. The second half is a skip through the months living together in the commune, dealing with humorous practicalities of keeping a hostage in the basement (someone’s got to empty the bucket), and watching Hope rekindle her frosty sisterly relationship with Lor.

Amaka Okafor is understandably incensed as Hope’s long time abandoned sister, who has turned to drink to drown her sorrows. Hope has a Happy Meal plays at The Royal Court’s Jerwood Theatre Upstairs space until Saturday 08 July. But as well as the joy of this humorously glo-brite vision, and the game show episode in which Hope’s deepest fears are presented in a nightmarish clown-led extravaganza, genuine emotions about the family are powerfully articulated. Yet despite the infiltration of the market into everything and everywhere, Fowler argues that hope and happiness is still possible (just look at the title, which gets an ironic twist in the play’s ending). Director Lucy Morrison and designer Naomi Dawson give these opening scenes an effectively crazed, funhouse air, with a primary-coloured set and a gameshow wheel.Hope is helped not only by Isla, but also by a random train passenger, a trucker and of course by Ali. That the characters live in an ultra-capitalist society where all landscapes and landmarks have been bought by conglomerates has no real bearing on the plot, except when characters get to say silly place names like Disney Quarry, Samsung Central and Nike International. At the very least you will have a brilliant couple of hours of theatrical entertainment with clowns, knives, guns, beautifully raw emotional dialogue, great performances, and some exquisite nightclub dancing.