Cuckoo at The Royal Court

This was another one of those evenings where the audience was a bit annoying.  I had a woman along from me who didn’t just laugh but responded back with little comments and repeating the funny lines.  Then in the second half someone had an audio reader turned on which spent about the first 10 minutes describing what was going on on stage really loudly - maybe they didn’t know how to use their headphones but it took them a really long while to sort it out.   

Anyway on to the actual play.  A mix between a sitcom and kitchen sink drama with an overlay of existential dread, and with a cast of 4; a grandmother, her two daughters and granddaughter.  The opening scene is an entertaining commentary on our  addiction to mobile phones as the family wait for their tea in absolute silence apart from the pinging of their phones and then eat their chippy tea with mobile phones in hand, communicating with the outside world, but also with each other.  There are good lines and laughs here as they share memes and texts, interspersed with actual conversations. 

Things take a bit of a turn when, after some news alerts about a terrorist attack and a discussion about climate change, granddaughter Megyn takes herself to her grandmothers bed and refuses to leave.  This is played as a mix of comedy and melodrama which kept me feeling unsettled as I didn’t really know how to react - clever if that was the intention.  The play challenges the idea of home as a place of safety when the outside world keeps getting in, and Megyn’s saccharine posts to the world for the month while she is in the room are in stark contrast to the reality.  The threats from the outside world are are all that you would expect, from climate change, unreliable and toxic men, to terrorism, the  cost of living crisis and zero hours jobs.  The women spend time trying to decide which of the scary things may have triggered Megyn's actions, interspersed with communicating with her by text.  

Overall, I suppose the point is that it is a scary world out there, and it would be nice to stay curled up at home in bed, although, as the play shows, you are not even safe in your bed, the technology lets it all in.  So, is the cuckoo the mobile phone, sneaking into our lives for both good and bad, or Megyn, sitting in her grandmother's nest and refusing to come out? And I don't think we should forget the other meaning of 'cuckoo' which is also woven in there through the concern over Megyn's mental health while barricaded in the bedroom.  I assume the answer is the play is aiming at all three . 

The actors do a great job, conjuring up a family who bicker but love each other really, creating believable rounded characters in the grandmother Doreen (Sue Jenkins)  and her two grown up daughters, Carmel (Michelle Butterly and Sarah ( Jodie McNee).  And Emily Harrison does well with the fairly tricky job of Megyn, who is largely a symbolic character.  

So overall, great performances creating likeable and believable characters and as a play covering the existential angst that comes from doom scrolling I enjoyed it, but it left me strangely unsatisfied in the end - is that a metaphor as well?

Update:  This one kept coming back to me and on reflection I like it a lot.   I joined some more dots from little bits that didn’t quite click at the time (the distracting audience probably didn’t help there) and now it makes quite a satisfying whole.