Review: CUCKOO, Royal Court

Blood is thicker than water and love is stronger than hate. There is a deep sentimental heart beating at the core of Michael Wynne’s new play that asks us what it means to connect as a family in our increasingly absurd lives. 

Vicky Featherstone’s production exudes a grounded surrealism; one where its recognisable ubiquity amplifies its unsettling aura. We are near Liverpool. The elderly Doreen, her two adult daughters Sarah and Carmel, and Carmel’s teenage daughter Megyn are tucking into a fish and chip takeaway in their garishly decorated living room. They are silent, bar the ominous whistle of a notification from their phones which they are staring at frozen in place. A news report: a potential terrorist attack. Gruesome deaths, and Pinteresque menace lingers. They scroll on. Same old.

This is where the mysterious mix of realism and surrealism begins to twist and swell; it doesn’t stop diffusing until the final beats. After a spat between the subdued Megyn and fiery Carmel, the former takes refuge in Doreen’s bedroom. She refuses to leave. Doreen cheerily obliges her granddaughter’s hermitude. Carmel is less forgiving, chastising her daughter’s drama queen antics.

We are challenged to speculate why, but don’t go in expecting answers. The family touch on a bevy of hot topics: climate anxiety, absent fathers, mental health, child abuse. They surface as leitmotifs not dissected individually but rather deliberately nebulously arranged as a collage.

Only then do we see that Cuckoo is not about why we run, but why we go where we go to escape from it all. Interestingly it’s the carefully curated images and their emotive force that ask these questions, not the plot. Wynne evokes this sense of gorgeously enigmatic warmth best with food. After a heartbreak, Jodie McNee’s Sarah bites into a Penguin biscuit and sips orange squash. Her eyes swell with a warmth that bubbles to the top, washing over her fraught inner tension. In a Proustian echo, you feel your own nostalgia from the depths of memory with each bite and sip.

The family dynamic is wonderfully enchanting, the bittersweet chemistry palpable from the outset thanks to subtle but towering performances. The tiniest details enrich images with organic depth, like the way Sue Jenkins’ Doreen grasps her phone in an endearingly senile way, clasping it with two hands whilst squinting down her nose at the screen.

We don’t get the final piece of the puzzle until the play takes its concluding breaths. The final image completes the picture in one tender swoop. I won’t spoil it. Experience it for yourself. It will remind you of a very literal home truth: that family is the ballast we tie ourselves to whatever the storms that life throws at us. It can weigh us down but without it we would be lost.

Cuckoo plays at the Royal Court until 19 August

Photo Credit: Manuel Harlan

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