Talking rice cookers tell of the death and despair in high pressure Korean society.

In Jaha Koo’s Cuckoo, one of the main selling points is the Cuckoo-brand rice cookers in the show, programmed to speak and sing on command. But don’t let the quirky gimmick fool you into thinking this is a cute show about talking cooking appliances.

The truth is, Cuckoo is a pitch black examination of South Korea’s economic crises and their impact on its people. In line with the other work in his Hamartia Trilogy, Cuckoo sees Jaha utilising personal anecdote as an entry point into larger societal problems, told through an cross-genre experience that combines video, original music, and performance.

Cuckoo does not make for easy viewing with multiple instances of incredibly violent and disturbing footage, such as opening with a montage of bloody South Korean protests over the years, with citizens brutalised and bloody, and even ending on a stark image of a single man jumping off the side of the bridge, presumably plummeting to his death.

Jaha ebbs and flows easily between the national and the personal perspective, and uses his own memories of being alone overseas to bring out the phenomenon of loneliness, isolate and the feeling of being utterly, hopelessly neglected in ‘Golibmuwon’ (고립무원). He exemplifies this through the symbol and metaphor of the Cuckoo rice pressure cookers to represent how stressed the Koreans have become. Three rice cookers are kept onstage, and perform as his co-actors, getting into arguments with each other, mimicking voices of friends and newscasters, and even singing original K-pop songs.

Cuckoo‘s tone shifts wildly over its one hour duration, flitting between sharp satire and sombre anecdotes in the blink of an eye. A video showing Gretchen Rubin cluelessly speaking about how easy it is to be happy is criticised by Jaha, before he reveals she is the daughter-in-law of former Clinton-administration Treasury Secretary and Goldman Sachs CEO Robert Rubin, who was responsible for ‘saving’ Korea from bankruptcy with an IMF bailout in 1997. Amidst a disturbingly jaunty song sung by the rice cookers about Robert Rubin (complete with photorealistic masks), Jaha pairs these with sobering facts about the difficult living conditions resulting from it, and the spike in suicide rates.

Elsewhere, Jaha hits hard with haunting anecdotes, including one of a 19-year old Korean boy who dies when he is struck by a train after being trapped while rushing to fix malfunctioning screen doors (ironically meant to protect people from trains), along with shock footage of a man jumping in front of a train. And when he brings out a raw, personal account of his own friend, who commits suicide not long after a miscommunication he blames himself for, you can hear the guilt in his voice, as he plays a song he wrote for the late Jerry.

There is a pervasive darkness and despair that characterises Cuckoo, the inescapable feeling of constantly wanting to claw your way out of a desperate situation, only to realise that no one is there to save you. In considering how macroeconomics and large scale government agreements and policy have crushed the lives on individual innocents, Cuckoo is a heavy, affecting piece of documentary theatre that masterfully wields its multimedia for both dark humour and piercing effect, making one realise how alone one is when faced with the burden of the world’s problems and incessant capitalism.

With Cuckoo, Jaha Koo has established himself as a master of unpacking seemingly innocuous ideas as linking them to greater socioeconomic issues. There is an urgency to Cuckoo that makes you both think and feel, and as we listen to a disturbingly happy tune at the end, we also watch Jaha meticulously craft a tiny rice man atop a rice tower only to fall over and be crushed. At one point, Jaha recalls how his family calls and asks ‘have you been eating well?’ And we are left to think of all the lonely, isolated people in the world, Korean or not, who don’t have such love, who find themselves at the end of their rope, trapped in their own despair, as the world spins on uncaringly, leaving them to die.

Photo Credit: Marie Clauzade

Featured Image Credit: Radovan Dranga

Photo Credit: Marie Clauzade

Cuckoo played on 27th and 28th May 2023 at the Drama Centre Black Box. More information available here

The 2023 Singapore International Festival of Arts runs from 19th May to 4th June 2023. Tickets and full details of programme available here

Production Credits:

Creator & Performer: Jaha Koo Ilse Delmeire Bart Huybrechts Wim Clapdorp Eunkyung Jeong