On a superficial level, Giuseppe Manfridi's 1990 play has a startling audacity. For its entire duration, we watch a young man and older woman having anal sex. Much to Beatrice's discomfort, Tito is lodged between her buttocks, unable to extract himself despite ejaculating every 10 or so minutes. Unfortunately, by about the fourth coming, any thrill of perverse novelty has worn off. What's left is a conventional domestic tragedy in which three people discover that the past is not what it seems.
The third party is Tito's father, Tobia, a doctor wielding an ominous pair of forceps and an ungainly ego. His pride in his son's prowess rapidly turns to dismay when he recognises Beatrice as the lost love of his youth, who broke his heart after a night of passion by becoming a nun. Their ensuing argument, punctuated by Tito's orgasmic cries, is so clunky with exposition and dismal innuendo that the inevitable revelation feels like an anti-climax.
Cuckoos could be read as a satire: an acid indictment of the unhealthily hermetic Italian family, whose inconsistent morals are all too easily manipulated for financial - and so, by implication, political - gain. But Manfridi's point is undermined by two things. His suggestion that the close relationship between Italian men and their mothers is practically incestuous edges towards cliche. More damagingly, his treatment of Beatrice feels appallingly reactionary. She is a fallen angel turned whore, dragging a boy "deeper into the unknown", as Tito puts it, by flaunting her sexuality. And because she dares to act upon her desires, she is humiliated, even destroyed. Cuckoos is a warning against the dangers of lust, and particularly lustful women, to make the Catholic church proud.
In his programme note, Peter Hall, who directed the play at London's Gate Theatre in 2000 and returns to it as part of the Barbican's Bite season, compares Manfridi to the Greek tragedians. It is no accident that the translator is Colin Teevan, who also worked with Hall on his productions of Tantalus and Euripides's Bacchai. But Cuckoos hasn't the resonance of those ancient plays; its characters may be deluded, but they're not tragic. In Hall's staccato production, they are not even sympathetic: David Yelland's Tobia has the air of a bluff Tory MP, Jessica Turner's Beatrice is like a prim private-school headteacher, while Mark Rice-Oxley's Tito is simply a spoiled brat. For all its purported oddness, this is an evening shrouded in conservatism.
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