Cuckoo brings the kitchen sink drama into the age of mobile phones — review

Cuckoo

Royal Court, London

Three woman sit round a kitchen table lost in their own thoughts. They could be Chekhov’s Three Sisters. Except they are on Merseyside. And they are looking not at each other, but at their mobile phones.

Michael Wynne’s new play, Cuckoo, mischievously evokes domestic portraitists past — such as Ibsen and Chekhov — and, most overtly, the kitchen sink dramas for which the Royal Court became famous. The setting, a modest Birkenhead kitchen, looks reassuringly familiar and solid (design by Peter McKintosh). But one of Wynne’s points is that these 2023 characters — three generations of one family — only semi-inhabit this naturalistic space; much of their lives are conducted online via their ever-present phones.

Widowed mother Doreen (Sue Jenkins) is embracing new freedoms online, selling unwanted goods on eBay and meeting a new man — a liaison she is trying to keep secret from her two adult daughters. Sarah (Jodie McNee), a breezily confident primary school teacher, seems also to have found love via a dating website. Carmel (Michelle Butterly) is struggling on a zero-hours contract and receives stress-inducing texts about shifts. And Megyn, Carmel’s daughter (Emma Harrison), is so overwhelmed by everything that she takes refuge in her grandmother’s bedroom, communicating only via texts and emojis.

Wynne gently traces a crucial period in the women’s lives when each of them is forced to move on in one way or another. Meanwhile he slips in multiple examples of the all-pervasive role of tech in our hyperconnected world: conversation is interrupted by news alerts, memes and messages. The dialogue is warm and crisply funny, delivered with rich authenticity by the excellent all-Liverpudlian cast.

Yet a sense of unease hovers over the play and over Vicky Featherstone’s production. It’s partly the nagging concern about the teenager locked in her grandma’s bedroom. But it’s also to do with something less tangible: the characters’ experience of lost certainties, of precariousness, of impotence in the face of global threat and job insecurity.

The mix of comedy and anxiety doesn’t quite work: there are periods when the play feels becalmed, some of Wynne’s points are hammered home and the ending seems an anticlimax. But he does nail down a very contemporary sense of uncertainty: the 2023 equivalent of Willy Loman’s great phrase, “I still feel — kind of temporary about myself.” And he portrays with great affection these four embattled women.

★★★☆☆

To August 19, royalcourttheatre.com, then Liverpool Everyman Sept 6-23, everymanplayhouse.com

Beneatha’s Place

Young Vic, London

In 1959 Lorraine Hansberry wrote a domestic drama that would become a seminal work. A Raisin in the Sun detailed the struggles of a black family in South Side Chicago as they tried to negotiate a system and a society stacked against them.

Kwame Kwei-Armah’s play, first staged in 2013 in Baltimore and now receiving its UK premiere, picks up the story where Hansberry left off. Beneatha’s Place opens as Beneatha (a character in the original) arrives in Nigeria, having left America to make a new life with her husband, political activist Joseph Asagai.

She soon runs up against the insidious legacy of colonialism. The outgoing white missionary tenants of her new home deliver patronising “advice” about how to switch the lights on; meanwhile Asagai (Zackary Momoh) is instantly embroiled in the tumultuous negotiations for independence.

Flash forward to the second act, set in the present. Beneatha has, in the interim, gone back to the US and become a respected dean at an Ivy League university. Faced with a proposed curriculum change — demoting her pioneering African American studies major in favour of one on critical whiteness — she brings faculty colleagues back to her Nigerian house to discuss the issue.

Like Hansberry, Kwei-Armah keeps the action in a domestic setting, raising questions about home, belonging and power. By act two, the very house where Beneatha has experienced the traumatic realities of history becomes the venue for a spiky intellectual debate about that history and the future of critical race theory. Is academia colonising the study of colonisation? Who gets to decide? Who frames the debate? It’s not just the enduring legacy of racism in the spotlight here, but the lens through which that legacy is scrutinised. Beneatha quotes Orwell: “Those who own history own the present; those who own the present, own the past.”

It’s a smart idea to use dramatic form to express the shift from lived experience to the contested examination of that experience: incident-packed narrative drama gives way to high-octane argument. It has drawbacks, however. In the first act, the context and what’s at stake are packed in too fast and there are weighty emotional developments that are left hanging. The second act is packed with trenchant argument but less rich in action.

But it’s carried along in Kwei-Armah’s production by terrific performances. Cherrelle Skeete is superb as Beneatha, a woman who has learned through bitter experience to play the long game, while Sebastian Armesto is toe-curlingly funny as her “whitesplaining” academic colleague. And coursing through it all are the questions proposed by Hansberry, by the Langston Hughes poem that gave her play its title, and by the title of Kwei-Armah’s response. What happens to a dream deferred? How far have we really come in tackling endemic racism? Where and what is Beneatha’s place?

★★★☆☆

To August 5, youngvic.org

A Playlist for the Revolution

Bush Theatre, London

Huge political themes roll through A Playlist for the Revolution too, another new play with a tight personal focus and a wide reach. In AJ Yi’s clever, mischievous political romcom, two students bump into each other at a Hong Kong party. She’s on a visit from the UK; he’s a resident. She’s funny, fashionable, impulsive; he’s staid, reserved, conventional. Naturally, they fall for each other instantly. On her return to England, the two keep in touch, forging a Spotify playlist between them.

So far, so good. But their fledgling relationship is playing out against the backdrop of the 2019 Hong Kong protests and, as these intensify, that playlist becomes more charged. Chloe (Mei Mei Macleod) uploads protest songs and music of resistance, determined to do her bit in supporting the demonstrations she believes Jonathan (Liam Lau-Fernandez) is attending. But he, fearful of the impact on his family, is not participating — to the dismay of Mr Chu (Zak Shukor), an elderly janitor at his college, who is out marching despite the risks.

Eventually matters come to a head, prompting a deeper interrogation from both young people of the role they can play. These plot developments are fairly schematic. But the play has tremendous zest and wit, tackles urgent issues nimbly, and skilfully poses weighty questions about protest, democracy and individual action.

Emily Ling Williams’s sprightly production pulsates with music — with songs of protest, revolution and resistance. Lau-Fernandez and Macleod are instantly relatable and immensely sympathetic, building a warm rapport with the audience, while Shukor provides a wry, dry counterbalance.

Three plays, each grappling in its own way with what it means to be an individual caught up in global change, what personal agency means and what it costs.

★★★★☆

To August 5, bushtheatre.co.uk