Theatre review: Cuckoo

The opening scene of Cuckoo is funny, but feels like it comes from an already-dated play: Women from three generations sit around a dining table silently, all glued to their mobile phones. They're not quite ignoring each other, as a lot of the messages, jokes and funny videos they're looking at they forward right on to each other and share a laugh. But it's still a disconnected kind of family scene, and when Sarah (Jodie McNee) arrives with the fish and chips, she still struggles to get her mother Doreen (Sue Jenkins,) sister Carmel (Michelle Butterly) and niece Megyn (Emma Harrison) to put their phones down and talk to each other. When they do, the conversation turns to climate change and the teenage Megyn, who’s already been almost silent, has some kind of emotional breakdown and runs upstairs to her grandmother’s bedroom.

And that’s where she stays for most of the rest of the play, refusing to go home with her mother and staying in Doreen’s bed for several weeks – relegating her grandmother to sleeping on the sofa, and occasionally texting to ask for food and drink to be left at the door.

In some ways Michael Wynne’s play is that critique of the ubiquity of mobile phones it first appears to be, although perhaps not in terms of criticizing their effect on people’s ability to function socially. Instead the fact that most of the family have alerts set up just for news of new crises and catastrophes around the world seems important, as the real way the phones invade their lives is in the threat or promise of new horrors coming in at any minute. We’ve seen a lot lately about Generation Z being handed an Apocalyptic future and told to deal with it, and them responding with anger and activism. Cuckoo gives us a teenager whose reaction is to cocoon away from it all and block the world out.

With Megyn out of the picture for most of the play, we’re left with her mother, grandmother and aunt trying to understand the situation while also dealing with their own lives and problems, and this is where I felt the play faltered: Kept strictly naturalistic in Vicky Featherstone’s production, everything touches on possible themes and directions but never really chooses which ones to run with. Vanessa saw it as a play where all the women have essentially had the same instinct as Megyn: Carmel pushes it down with a no-nonsense, tough exterior, while Doreen is only now fully accepting of the fact that her marriage to her late husband was an unhappy one.

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Sarah’s boundless enthusiasm and optimism is clearly going to be horribly crushed in the second act, and the predictability of this is another thing that irked me. Fortunately the cast give sparky readings to some sharply funny dialogue, making up for the fact that the play as a whole can feel at times so laid-back it might as well be wrapped in a duvet like Megyn.

The naturalistic Birkenhead house of Peter McKintosh’s design ends in a black hole at the top of the stairs where Megyn disappears to, and together with the eerie crackling of Nick Powell’s sound design – wittily, it’s the kind of interference that mobile phones (used to?) cause to theatre sound systems – it gives the impression that something more supernatural could be happening under the everyday surface. Vanessa wasn’t the only person I heard at the interval wondering if there was a Kafkaesque twist coming up, and instead of the titular cuckoo being a metaphor for Megyn in her grandmother’s house, or the mobile phones in everyone’s hands, the teenager might be metamorphosing into an actual bird.

On the one hand this ambiguity about what’s going on is one of the play’s strengths, opening it up to different interpretations by different audience members. But for me the ambiguity’s held on to too long, and the fact that Wynne never quite resolves what he’s even trying to tackle with the play leaves it unsatisfying.

Cuckoo by Michael Wynne is booking until the 19th of August at the Royal Court’s Jerwood Theatre Downstairs.

Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.