It’s Violet Fox’s birthday over and over again; there’s balloons, party bags, musical chairs and Spice Girls is ringing out through the auditorium. The icing on the cake? Multitudinous renditions of ‘Happy Birthday’, sung out with a ventriloquist’s expertise in the voices of her childhood musical heroines. The only problem is, her alcoholic mother keeps crashing the party…

Sonia Jalaly’s hilarious and explosive solo performance, Happy Birthday Without You, toys with its audience’s desire to neatly distinguish truth from fiction through a satirical look into Violet’s turbulent relationship with her mother. Violet glides and flays about the stage, dancing to the sounds of her damaged childhood memories with toe-curling satire and refreshingly uninhibited comedy. One of her first declarations of the show assures us that what we will be hearing is all entirely autobiographical (phew), offering the show up as a commentary on our obsessive interest in other people’s day-to-day lives.

Violet yearns for individuality: to be more unique and more interesting than everyone else in the room. In fact, she repeatedly tells us with certainty that she is. And despite the irony, she’s right – nothing about this performance is ordinary, from the Robin Thicke-esque balloons spelling out “Violet Fox” in huge letters at the back of the stage, to Violet’s final flourish as her drunken mother violently whisking a bowl of Angel Delight.  A “troubled artist”, Violet is desperate for her life to be a story worth telling; so desperate, in fact, that we quickly lose sight of the real and get lost in the anecdotal madness of her animated orating skills. Jalaly is all eyes and limbs, and skilfully manages to keep her audience engaged in the story through riotous movements across the stage, punctuated with recounted memories that move slowly towards the revelation of what really happened, “that time in the park”.

It’s said that body language has infinitely more capacity to make us laugh than the words coming out of a mouth, and this is certainly true here – if you could press mute, Jalaly’s facial expressions are enough to have you in stitches. Charismatic as her rhythmic London twang is, it isn’t about what she is saying, but how she is saying it; it doesn’t matter what is real or what is fictional, just that we are engaged and entertained by the journey being recounted for us. Beneath the jokes, however, there is a certain darkness to be found in the persistent encouragement to laugh at the painful memories Violet is describing and imagining for her audience. The nature of satire is often to leave us unsettled, and Jalaly strikes just the right balance to keep her audience cheerful, without allowing them to be complacent.

Ruby Thompson’s direction merges both intricately timed comedy and the propensity for a live and untimed response: some of the funniest moments are Jalaly’s spontaneous reactions to her audience. There is a real sense that this is an all-inclusive, unique and, most of all a truly live event. Here is a bold yet gentle comment on our expectations of theatre, performance, live art, and how seriously we all-too-often take ourselves. Yet, like all the best kind of performance, Happy Birthday Without You is layered in a way that makes it accessible to all, whether there to dig deep or simply to lift the January blues. Jalaly brings to the Tricycle Theatre an energy to be envied, and certainly not to be missed. Here’s hoping for a tour!

Happy Birthday Without You played at the Tricycle Theatre. For more information, see the Tricycle Theatre website. Photo by Luke Pajak.