Theatre Review: Cooked!
COOKED!
Breaking up has never been so messy
A Mermaids Production
10/10/22-11/10/22 The Barron at the Byre, St Andrews
Directed by: Laura Walker and Millie Haldane
Produced by: Molly Warner
Written by: Millie Haldane
Reviewed by Iain Lynn
A contract killer walks into a room and leaves with a roast dinner. This is the world you’re invited into in Cooked! a new drama written by St Andrews’ student Millie Haldane.
Cooked! covers the domestic deterioration of a couple, Isabelle (Natalie Westgor) and Finn (Sacha Threipland). Like anyone stuck in a loveless relationship, they each hire a hitman to free themselves from each other. The only problem is they’ve hired the same hitman, Pete (Jack Detwiler), who, if the murder business ever runs dry, could make a killing as a couples-councillor. After successfully rearranging their deaths to the following night, the hitman returns, as does Finn’s mistress Susie (Sofia Hattiangadi), and a newly hired first-time contract killer Tony (Sam Klein). If this all sounds like the stuff of high farce, that’s because it is just that – a well-engineered, slickly-scripted eruption that matches the high tension of a loaded gun with the mundanity of a domestic dispute.
This is where Cooked! reaches its peak. The cramped living room is host to quickly rising tempers, naturally leading into well-received comedy. Once reaching this climatic moment, the tension is resolved through the discovery that Susie, Finn’s 18-year-old mistress is pregnant. The play opts, after this big reveal, for a scene change to Isabelle and Susie discussing teen pregnancy and abusive relationships. These themes can be handled in a comedy, but the way in which they are in the frequent scene changes throughout the second half of the play, leans more towards stone-faced sobriety. This would work were it not for the fact that as soon as the conversation ends, we are brought back to the living room and quick-fire punchlines without any time to re-calibrate. There is a very fine line between making something dark comedic, and just having something horrific happen in a comedy.
We return to the living room to see Tony, the first-time-hitman dead by Finn’s hands – a personal devastation. I was disappointed not to see more of Sam Klein’s high energy performance as Tony which, partnered with Jack Detwiler’s seasoned killer turned couples-councillor, provides the heart of Cooked! at its best.
Following an altercation between the agitated Finn, a Susie who just wants to leave, and the professional killer who does what he does best, Susie is killed. This is, I feel, where the audience was slightly lost, we’ve just been told this is a young, pregnant woman and within the space of half an hour, she is killed in front of us, followed by a string of jokes that don’t land as well as they had been. Susie’s death is followed by Pete’s, and we are given two endings: the first is Isabelle finally ending her partner’s reign of cruelty and dancing to Nancy Sinatra – who could ask for anything more? Cooked! cuts our dream short and finishes the play with Finn and Isabelle cleaning up their bloody living room, preparing for the day ahead. A brutal, depressing, perfect ending.
Cooked! presents a dilemma. On the one hand, when the comedy works, it really works – tight blocking from Laura Walker and Millie Haldane as co-directors lends to the snappy timing in the first half, leaving us with a constant source of change and energy from the actors. However, when Cooked! wrestles with intense themes, delving into spiking, gaslighting, teen pregnancies, infidelity, and, of course, murder, it leaves us barely any time to process these concerns before the comedy returns.
Cooked! is not just a well-written play, it’s two well-written plays fighting for our attention, one a slick crime comedy with a Shakespearian death toll, the other an intense, straight-faced, emotional drama of a couple disintegrating, making the comedy seem in poor taste and the drama seem out of place. Would I see Cooked! again? Absolutely. However, I would chew off my own arm to see the two plays Cooked! could be.
