Cow, Uninterrupted: Micky Delahunty on their new absurdist show

In Micky Delahunty’s new show, two women are plagued with annoyance at the world around them. An interview with the playwright on this new play, what draws them to work for young people, and their second time onstage in “thirty-something” years.

Micky Delahunty is one of New Zealand's most prolific, and awarded, playwrights. Since the 80s, they've written over 30 works for the stage, with much of their work being for young theatremakers. Their awards include the Bruce Mason Playwriting Award in 1987 and the Playmarket Award in 2019, recognising their significant artistic contribution to theatre.

However Interrupting Cow, which opens at Basement Theatre tonight, marks just the second time they've appeared on the stage in recent years (after #UsToo in 2020). The play is an absurdist comedy about two women who are "plagued with annoyance".

Whereas #UsToo was explicitly about their relationship with sister Catherine Delahunty and their lives together, Interrupting Cow was written more with the pair playing fictional characters onstage. “She was happy to come on and basically be told what to do because she’s not an actor,” Micky Delahunty says. “She’s really happy to do what I say.” Because they live on opposite ends on the island – Catherine in Thames, and Micky closer to Wellington – they travel up and down to rehearse and workshop, then will disperse for a few months before coming together again.

They wrote it in two days, after reading a little bit about the theatre of the absurd. “I just did it,” Delahunty says. “We were still fiddling around with this pandemic, I was feeling the world was a bit fucked and I wanted to do a snapshot of how I felt about it, how I saw the world at the moment.”

Waiting for Godot was not quite an inspiration for the piece, but more sort of an oblique reference point. Delahunty has adapted many shows in the past, usually Shakespearean shows and critiquing them with a critical lens, but this wasn’t anywhere close to that. They took the form of it, as many playwrights have and will continue to do, which is two people waiting, and then the arrival of the third, and spun out their own story from there. 

“I just took the idea and went, “Yeah, well, what if Catherine and I were those couple of people wandering along? What might happen?”

This is the second show that Delahunty has been a part of in 2024, having directed Jimmy as part of New Zealand Fringe, a musical tribute to a Wellington artist who had passed away, and who co-composed many of the songs. Delahunty’s work with young people, which extends to musician Ari Leason on Interrupting Cow, has been a core part of their practice for the past 30 years, and alongside their many plays, they’ve mentored many theatre practitioners in turn. “I’m just not interested in people who are grown up, I suppose,” they say. “I gravitate towards people who feel a bit immature.” 

In a way that work connects them with their sister, as they connect very much in the same way as when they were children. “Obviously we have lives, have lived a long time and dealt with a lot of shit, but she and I can get into a good, playful, space. She’s not settling down into being a certain way because we’re now in our 70s. 

“That’s what we both appreciate about each other. We’re still ready to do new things and muck around.”

Interrupting Cow also marks the second time Delahunty has been onstage since giving up acting “thirty-something” years ago. After the death of the same friend that had inspired Jimmy, a new perspective came into their mind. If they could survive what happened then, everything else was kind of minor. “Before Covid, I had such a feeling that the show must go on, and it’s all so incredibly important,” they say. “But Covid taught us that sometimes the show doesn’t go on and the world does not end.”

“It’s realised that it’s just a play.” 

They also believe that the line between them and the audience has disappeared, a line they acknowledge might come from inside their own head. Before, they believed that they had to give the audience something perfect, or they’d be disappointed. The audience wasn’t there to enjoy or learn, but to criticize and look for fault. If it didn’t happen perfectly? “It was a complete failure.”

“I just realised we were all people – on the stage and off the stage,” they say. Their entire way of thinking about it was lowered. It wasn’t life or death anymore. The audience is there ready to receive it, take it for what it is, and get what they can out of it.

“I know what a life or death experience is and it’s not that.”

Now, they find it very satisfying to be onstage, to hear an audience laugh and respond to them. It’s what they loved about the craft when they did it all those years ago. They bring up a specific part of the play they like doing because of the character’s complete loss of temper and control. “You don’t really get the chance to do that in real life, when you’re an adult, so I really like going for it at this particular bit.”

“For some reason, I’m really fond of this play already! I do have mixed feelings about lots of other ones at times. But this one? It just feels easy.”

Interrupting Cow runs at Basement Theatre from April 9-13. You can buy tickets here.