Baffling. That’s the only word to describe Michael Wynne’s play, an amusing but aimless Liverpudlian sitcom featuring three generations of women, laced with hints of existential or supernatural dread that come to nothing. It’s well acted, and fluently directed – as part of her valedictory season as boss of the Royal Court – by Vicky Featherstone. She must have seen something profound in it. Me, I kept waiting for something to happen. But hardly anything does.
In a modest Birkenhead living room where the carpets, curtains and wallpaper are in violent disagreement, genially bustling widow Doreen (Sue Jenkins) sits down to a chippy tea with daughters Carmel and Sarah, and Carmel’s teenage daughter Megyn. Doreen is addicted to flogging her possessions on e-commerce sites, Carmel works in Boots and Sarah at a primary school. Megyn, having flunked her exams, is doing… well, nothing. Not even really speaking.
Although the older women exchange gently spiky Scouse banter, all four of them are mostly hypnotized by their phones: auction updates, sexts, news of terrorist atrocities, memes. After a dispute about the seriousness of the climate crisis – Doreen complains that even David Attenborough is “a bit of a miz-bag now” – Megyn bolts upstairs and locks herself in Doreen’s bedroom.
And that’s where she stays till near the end of the play, texting grandma to leave processed snacks outside the door and posting weird passive aggressive stuff about her mum and her absent dad on social media. Grumbling, the older women nonetheless adapt. Is Megyn the cuckoo of the title? Or is it the mobile phone, devouring the family’s attention (a concept so obvious it’s fatuous)? Maybe the women are all cuckoos, revealed to be strangers to each other when not-very-shocking family secrets dribble out. Or maybe *humans* are the cuckoo, sucking the planet dry… Who knows? Who cares?
Though this matriarchy has internal problems, external threats also surface and vanish. Climate change is most frequently mentioned, but violence is next, largely expressed through Sarah’s comically horrible stories about six-year-olds bringing meat cleavers to assembly, and dads brandishing crossbows in the car park. The sisters wonder vaguely but inconsequentially if Megyn has been assaulted or trolled. Men are offstage bastards: even Doreen’s beloved husband is revealed to have been a controller who wouldn’t let her work or have “coleslaw in the house”. Carmel is close to penury, facing a zero-hours contract and borrowing money from her mum.
More potent but equally inconclusive is the sense that something spooky is going on. Carmel has formless night terrors and there are spectral shufflings overhead. Rain pours as a haunting version of folk song The Cuckoo plays, and framing bars of light flicker and glitch around Peter McKintosh’s broadly realist set. But again, the scalp-prickling moments collapse and sink back into the soup of Wynne’s always humorous, never hilarious dialogue.
You can’t really fault the all-Scouse cast. Jenkins is quietly wonderful as the warm, chuntering, unwittingly funny granny keeping her sex life hidden from her daughters. Michelle Butterly and Jodie McNee ably fulfil their respective requirements to be comically sardonic and earnest as Carmel and Sarah. Recent graduate Emma Harrison makes her professional debut as Megyn and she’s fine in a truly awful part which keeps her offstage for most of the action, gives her hardly any dialogue, and requires her to act out three pages of wilfully mysterious stage directions.
Wynne is an established writer with many estimable stage and screen credits: he won an Evening Standard film award in 2012 for the script of My Summer of Love, which launched the career of Emily Blunt. But I’ve no idea why this play has been put on. Contemporary concerns are imperfectly bolted onto a set of jokey family relationships that wouldn’t look out of place in a 1980s ITV series. Like I say: baffling.
Royal Court Theatre, to 19 Aug; royalcourtheatre.com
