WEDNESDAY, APRIL 22, 2026
Cuckoo-Land
Production Photo: Carrie Davenport
Frenzied, electrifying and truly punk rock, Vittoria Cafolla's Cuckoo-Land is a consummately crafted tale of tumultuous truths powerfully parlayed for an enraptured and well-rewarded MAC audience in Belfast through the prism of a quasi-musical. Loud and proud tunes, with music and lyrics by Katie Richardson, bond with singularly sharp satire and immaculately considered commentary as director Paula McFetridge and her production team adapt the true story of the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition as an effervescent, eclectic and most excellent piece of gig theatre which is arresting, incisive and audaciously implemented.
If there ever is a time to apply and adapt the saying that "size matters not", Cuckoo-Land is certainly it, with Tracey Lindsay's set, the ensemble of six, the relatively small number of songs and the one act, ninety-minute length belying their compact nature with unmistakable vibrancy. The use of colour, which extends into Enda Kenny's costuming, Mary Tumelty's lighting, the chess board-like stage floor and Fergus Wachala-Kelly's cleverly caricatural video design, is idiosyncratically inventive, a dextrous and detailed setting for Paula O'Reilly's choreography and uniformly strong acting from Orla Gormley, Caroline Curran, Allison Harding, Orla Mullan, Christina Nelson and Maeve Byrne, all of whom have made their name and proven their worth in every genre one can think of.
It really is a Cuckoo-Land, then, a kind of sensory overload, but that is also apt for the formation of the cross-community party that was the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition, or the NIWC, and their goals. We take a trip back in time to mid-1990s Belfast, where party founders Monica McWilliams (Gormley) and Pearl Sagar (Curran) join with Bronagh Hinds (Mullan), Avila Kilmurray (Nelson), May Blood (Harding) and Anne McCann (Byrne), and, along with musicians Cheylene Murphy and Jackie Rainey in their corner-of-the-stage band, invite us to lose ourselves in the psychological and philosophical anarchy while they and we try and get to grips with what's going on.
Production Photo: Carrie Davenport
Going beyond mere adherence to the essence of a crucial cause at a crucial time, Cafolla's script is a work of ingenious integration, popular music and popular culture boldly and brilliantly blending with vital messaging. As the women of the NIWC battle for recognition in a man's world, the realisations on their journey are strong, frequent and, bizarrely, sometimes amusing. The play examines the arguments and point-scoring in party politics, as well as the difference between being in power and on a campaign, which leads to a contrast between the aspirational and the protectionist where consistency and stability threaten to amount to complacency and stagnancy. When we compare passion from the females with incoherent babbling from the significant males of the time period, who are represented merely as a set of giant heads carried by some of the cast – you'll know what I mean when you see them – we get what feels like an echo of that great moment from Mike Judge's Beavis And Butt-Head Do America where a group of politicians just laugh along with the famous duo's puerile misogyny. It's like Judge is a great, yes, judge of character, in the same way Cafolla clearly is – some things just don't seem to change, or some people just don't want to change, which makes it most important that a necessary starting point for evolution is found and built upon.
And that is difficult, especially with the promise of belonging and the cushion of a safety net that a systematic, organised and controlled way of living can bring. Cuckoo-Land smartly and even-handedly acknowledges this by recognising that the women could be losing as much from their aspirations as they could be gaining, and that a one-rule-for-everyone approach, which has been and is continuing to be part of life's legacy of short-term successful leadership, either may not be sustainable or can be tragically truncated by the worst sort of happenstance. The triumphs and tragedies of togetherness find a new voice in Cuckoo-Land, a play which is most rewarding in its ambition and greatly sobering in its substance. It is alert, alive and affecting art as humanisation and dehumanisation – a standout endeavour.
Simon Fallaha
Cuckoo-Land, a Kabosh Theatre production, runs at The MAC, Belfast, until Sunday April 26. More information on the production, and tickets, can be found here.