The Hypocrite by Jo Hamya review – sun, sex, scenery and family guilt

A playwright brings unresolved memories to the stage in this clever study of art, dysfunction and generational difference

Jo Hamya’s first book, Three Rooms, was a polemical novel about middle-class precarity, sophisticated but sometimes bowed by& the weight of its thematic concerns. Her second, The Hypocrite, is a novel about a play about a novel. It begins with a mother on a beach in Sicily watching her husband and toddler daughter paddling. The mother doesn’t much like the father, who “worked on his novel in the other room” for much of the holiday. She resents her invisibility. And then we skip to 2020, London, and an autobiographical play& cautiously produced in semi-lockdown, in which a teenage Sophia and her father stay in a borrowed villa on a Sicilian island in August.

The stage father is writing a novel, or mostly dictating it for the stage daughter to type. His novel is about a novelist having sexual adventures while taking a holiday on a Sicilian island. While the adult Sophia’s father watches the play, Sophia herself has lunch with her mother. Sophia and her mother discuss, over a lot of wine and some barely touched Italian food, Sophia’s father’s probable reaction to seeing himself and his writing and his& relationship with his daughter performed on stage. Sophia’s father& is& indeed dismayed by her representation of him and his work, and becomes increasingly distressed as he wanders London after the play rejecting her increasingly anxious calls.