Three women of varying ages sit at a table ignoring each other, their focus entirely on what is going on on their phones, which ping with new messages to which they react until the eldest, Doreen, gets a message announcing someone on their way, one of them sends a message on to her and they share a laugh before Sarah, her youngest daughter, arrives bringing fish and chips from the local chippy.
Plates have already been warming and Sarah plonks each still-wrapped portion on a plate for them to eat straight out of the paper. You get the feeling that this is a regular Friday night family ritual.
Here we have three generations of a family in Birkenhead meeting at granny’s: widowed Doreen (Sue Jenkins) who has taken to emptying cupboards to sell things online, primary schoolteacher Sarah (Jodie McNee) who has got a new dentist boyfriend met online, her elder daughter Carmel (Michelle Butterly) who works at Boots and Carmel’s daughter Megyn (Emma Harrison making her professional debut) who at seventeen has flunked her exams and seems to have stalled her life. They all get committed, idiosyncratic performances and feel like a real family.
It is a mixture of mild social satire and kitchen sink comedy as they share their own latest news and that on social media, including a terrorist attack in Germany and concern for the environment. Then something upsets Megyn and she flees upstairs, shutting herself in her grandmother’s room. There is no explanation why she does this, but when her mother and aunt leave, she is still up there.
There Megyn stays, taking over Doreen’s bed not just for the night but for weeks, while her grandmother sleeps on the sofa and seems to happily accept being at the beck and call of her texting. She leaves food and other things outside the bedroom door like a bird raising a cuckoo that has taken over her nest. They communicate by text and send each other videos, but there is no explanation of what has caused Megyn’s behaviour. However, she is posting some weird stuff on social media about her mum and her absent dad.
Vicky Featherstone’s production has the realism of a Merseyside soap opera threaded with gentle humour and a hint that something unusual, even supernatural could happen, but it never does, though there is an enigmatic ending.
Cuckoo ticks off reference to a number of topics from climate change to zero hours contracts, children taking weapons to school, the risks when you get involved with someone for whom you have only a mobile number, no home address, no workplace, and of course the way the smartphone has killed real conversation, but what is Michael Wynne’s play really about?
I don’t have an answer but applaud its fine cast, especially Sue Jenkins as Doreen, touchingly revealing the pressures she lived under from her late husband and expressing the pleasure she now gets in handling her own money and making her own choices.