Play: The Making of Moo

Overview
Nigel Dennis's The Making of Moo is a darkly comic satire from 1957 that imagines the rise of a fabricated religion built around a sacred cow. The play explores how belief systems can be deliberately constructed and how people flock to ritual and authority when offered purpose, spectacle, or profit. Its humor is corrosive rather than gentle, exposing the mechanics of persuasion and the strange comforts of communal delusion.
The work treats religion as a human invention that can be packaged, marketed, and administered. Rather than attacking faith directly, the play scrutinizes the social, political, and personal incentives that sustain organized creeds, showing how piety and opportunism often become indistinguishable.

Plot
The action follows the deliberate creation and rapid institutionalization of "Moo," a ceremonial cult centered on a supposed sacred bovine. What begins as an intentionally contrived set of rituals and doctrines soon takes on a life of its own as converts multiply and structures of authority solidify. Moments intended as hoaxes become dogma, and the original manipulators find themselves trapped by the very faith they manufactured.
As the movement grows, contradictions multiply: sanctity is used to justify privilege, doubt is punished as heresy, and rituals turn into mechanisms of social control. The narrative moves briskly between comic setups and darker consequences, tracking how spectacle and language are deployed to naturalize fiction into truth.

Characters and Themes
Characters populate roles that are simultaneously archetypal and sharply observed: the schemer who engineers belief, the eager convert who craves meaning, the opportunist who monetizes ritual, and the skeptic who sees the fraud but cannot stop its spread. Dennis avoids mere caricature by showing how each figure serves a necessary function within the religion's life cycle, making the satire feel systemic rather than personal.
Key themes include the manufacture of authority, the elasticity of truth under social pressure, and the interchangeability of sincerity and hypocrisy. The play interrogates how communal narratives are constructed and sustained, and how ordinary people can be complicit in creating myths that comfort them while undermining their autonomy.

Style and Tone
The Making of Moo blends farce and moral interrogation, maintaining a brisk, witty tone even as it probes unsettling questions. Dialogue is sharp and performative, often undercut by irony, and stage business is used to magnify the gap between surface piety and underlying calculation. The play's satire is theatrical: it stages the hypocrisy it critiques, inviting the audience to laugh and to wince at the same time.
Dennis uses humor as a diagnostic tool rather than a relief valve. The laughter the play provokes is meant to illuminate the absurdities of social ritual and to make clear how easily the trappings of the sacred can be enlisted for mundane ends.

Significance and Reception
At the time of its publication and performances, the play was noted for its audacity and its willingness to take aim at institutional credulity in a postwar context that was reexamining traditional authorities. Its insights into propaganda, group psychology, and the commercialization of belief have kept it relevant to later audiences and readers interested in satire and social critique.
The Making of Moo stands as a provocative example of mid-20th-century theatrical satire, combining wit with a trenchant analysis of how societies construct and maintain meaning. Its legacy rests in its capacity to unsettle complacency about faith, power, and the theatrical mechanics that turn fiction into accepted reality.