Cock

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Date	Time	Venue	Notes	Prices	Booking Link
Available Performances
Dates in November
Fri 13 Nov 2009	7:45pm		Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Sat 14 Nov 2009	7:45pm		Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Sun 15 Nov 2009	7:45pm		Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Mon 16 Nov 2009	7:45pm		Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Tue 17 Nov 2009	7:45pm		Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Wed 18 Nov 2009	7:45pm	Press Night	Jerwood Theatre Upstairs
Sold out Performances

Reviews

5 stars The Independent, by Paul Taylor, 23 November 2009

A brilliant study in bisexuality

It’s been a big week for the male member on the London stage. The penis is a wayward minx and, as Alan Bennett’s Auden puts it in The Habit of Art, it’s a shocking little shape-shifter, often shrivelling up so small as to make the distinction between circumcised and uncircumcised a matter of absolute speculation, while constituting a key instance of “the propensity of the flesh to creep”.

Now, the young playwright Mike Bartlett gives us, on behalf of his generation, an equivalently brilliant and blackly hilarious feat of provocation (and one which also pivots on the penis) in Cock at the Theatre Upstairs. Trust me: you won’t find such marvellous moment-by-moment acting (from the four-strong cast) or more punctiliously expressive direction (from James Macdonald) anywhere in the country at present. Admittedly, Cock is no prick-teaser as a title, but by the end of this intense, unbroken 80-minute encounter with Bisexuality and its Discontents, you may feel that word also connotes a load of overbearing, pernicious bollocks and richly describes the exclusively gay half of the conflicted young male, same-sex couple at the centre.

Lady Bracknell would have the right expression to encapsulate what John (the lovely, quiveringly subtle Ben Whishaw) is up to. She would say that he is “shilly-shallying”. He’s in a festering long-term relationship with M who is portrayed with acute comic understanding of the character’s hang-ups by the ever-brilliant Andrew Scott. I’m afraid that I watched M with appalled fascination for the way he treats poor John is more or less how I treat my wife and children. His basic unit of communication is the kind of baroque aria of the bullying, queeny self-display that is self-dislike turned inside out. To admit anything to this man is to give a hostage to fortune; tell him that a woman is not your standard idea of feminine, and he’ll turn it into a vicious running gag whereby the woman is incrementally transformed into Arnold Schwarzenegger with illegal levels of testosterone. Me all over, too, I fear.

John falls in love with a woman (a delicious portrait of an intuitive sounding board turning herself into a predatory guilt-trip from the divine Katherine Parkinson). John’s affront to gay good taste really separates the men from the boys, so to speak. There’s all hell to pay, and quite a lot of purgatory to be going on with. Up to now, though, this review hasn’t been quite straight with you. You may be thinking that Cock is the bisexual classic of our era. But instead it eventually smashes through the notion of identity politics, arguing that they were a useful fiction on the march to liberation a debate that flowers into dotty, divisive life when, bringing with him the prejudices of his own generation, M’s father (all hilarious, low-key fixation in Paul Jesson’s spot-on) arrives to back him up at a grisly dinner quatre.

I may have given the impression, too, that the play is conventionally staged. In fact, it rinses the stage bracingly clean of all realistic redundancy, reducing or rather aggrandising the relationships to twitchy sport-like confrontations of mimed, fully clothed skin-flick nakedness in a wooden cockpit, with the characters talking in ways that often amount to nothing more than a running commentary on the emptiness of life in the hermeneutic rat-run of their self-making. And here is where the thematic and spiritual overlap with The Habit of Art is uncanny. Bennett argues that innocence is a myth and tolerance should come from a due recognition that in our hearts and in our imagination, we’ve committed most of the things that the world punishes. Bartlett contends that “thinking” in all the old customary categories is precisely what does our heads in. Both plays are seriously radical. Cock is also a heady example of the way that concentration on theatre’s unique aesthetic capacities can help a dramatist to go the extra mile morally. I await Bartlett’s next piece in a mock-sweat of unseemly anticipation.

4 stars Evening Standard, by Henry Hitchings, 19 November 2009

The title of Mike Bartletts new play may excite your inner punster, but the piece itself is far from being a trawl through tawdriness. Instead its a smart, prickly and rewarding view of sexual and emotional confusion.

Ben Whishaw plays John, an apparently gay young man who lives with M, a spiky stockbroker. While taking a break from their relationship, John has an encounter with W (The IT Crowds Katherine Parkinson). This sparks unexpected sexual excitement, and suddenly his whole existence is in turmoil.

Bartletts premise is intriguing. For John, choice is not a luxury. Rather, its disabling. He oscillates between wanting to return to M and planning a new life with W. His equivocation is deeply irritating and at the same time painfully familiar to us.

The writing is lubricious, sometimes grubby and in places savagely unpleasant. But it has a wounding authenticity. We laugh nervously, aware of its precision.

James Macdonalds direction accentuates the awkwardness of events. There are no props and theres no furniture; designer Miriam Buether has created a space that manages to be both anonymous and oppressively intimate.

Seated in the round and in remarkable discomfort, the audience feels as if it is watching something akin to a medical procedure or a pagan rite. Although the characters rarely touch, their physicality is viscerally immediate.

The ferally feline Whishaw has some fine moments of tenderness, tousled angst and wounded loquacity. Meanwhile, Parkinson is kooky yet steely. She is capable of a magnetic stillness.

She also gets some of the best lines, as when shes aroused and says she has a gap on (replace gap with hard and youll get the picture).

Its Andrew Scott as M, however, who impresses most. Reminiscent of a turbocharged Dylan Moran, he combines sweary viciousness with a kind of hapless vulnerability.

Bartletts play is excruciating not in the sense that its bad, but in its relentless probing of raw emotions. In the final stages I found myself wanting to bellow at the characters. I didnt, of course, though I was desperate to rouse one from his self-pity and another from somnolent indecision.

The trios manipulations and self-deceptions are blazingly conveyed. Some will dislike Bartletts less than chaste language, and no one could pretend that this is a soothing or uplifting way to spend an hour and a half. But its an impressive package.

4 stars Financial Times, by Sarah Hemming, 22 November 2009

Given that there was a live chicken on the Royal Court stage recently, there was an outside chance that this new play would have something to do with roosters. But only an outside chance. This is a drama about foul, rather than fowl, behaviour.

Writer Mike Bartlett has proved a devastatingly astute observer of adults behaving badly and this latest work is no exception. Here he turns his attention to sex, or rather to the emotional morass that can accompany it, and to the question of sexual identity. The result is bold, painful and, in James Macdonald’s superb production, often very funny.

Bartlett basically sets up a love triangle but one with a twist. John has been living with his boyfriend for seven years and the two have hit the rocks. They split up for a while and John meets someone else. A woman. There ensues a tug of war for John’s affections that culminates in a ghastly dinner, with all three parties present, plus the father of John’s boyfriend, who wades in to try and sort things out.

Its hard to buy the idea that John might hang his whole future on two weeks with his female lover: the contest seems a bit uneven. But, in the end, that doesn’t matter because the drama really takes place on a psychological level. It is John’s response to his dilemma, and the response of the two aggrieved lovers, that is the matter in hand. And in exploring that, Bartlett is unnervingly perceptive.

John’s indecision becomes completely paralysing: the more he is pressed for an answer, the further he drifts from making one. Bartlett unpicks brilliantly the unsettling effect of this on everyone. “You need to work out what you are”, demands the boyfriend’s father. But John’s experience is that his sexual identity and his sense of self are more nebulous and unfixed than he had thought. This disturbs and disables everyone present.

But what is also unnerving is Bartlett’s ear for argument. He catches precisely the way people talk themselves into confrontation and wilfully push on past a point of no return. He demonstrates how infantile adults can become when faced with losing someone they love. He is mercilessly accurate, wickedly funny and strangely touching.

Macdonald’s precise staging quicksteps through the tenderness and tantrums. He emphasises the very different physical presences of his excellent actors. Ben Whishaw as John is compelling: wispy, wiry, beguiling and infuriating. Andrew Scott rattles about as his brittle, handsome, petrified boyfriend, while Katherine Parkinson brings a sweet stillness to the girlfriend. No one takes their clothes off and yet they all seem terrifyingly naked.

4 stars Sunday Times, by Jane Edwardes, 22 November 2009

Ben Whishaw’s John is a bit of a tease, but “Cock” is still too blunt a title for Mike Bartlett’s gripping exploration of male sexuality. An unsual triangular relationship plays out under glaring lights in the plywood arena of Miriam Buether’s set. John (the only character to be given a name) has always fancied men. Given his rumpled hair, big eyes and hangdog expression, it’s hardly surprising that both M and W love him and want to look after him. What is surprising is that M is a man and W is a woman. Confronted with the possibility of two very different lives, John can’t make up his mind. Does he want to stay with M or move in with W and have a more conventional life? Can he choose to be gay or straight? John wants both.

James Macdonald’s production shuns props and furninture. When John has sex with a woman for the very first time, he and Katherine Parkinson’s W neither lie down nor remove their clothes, but rather intimately move in ever-decreasing circles. We eavesdrop on slivers of conversation that are sometimes painful and sometimes outrageously funny. Andrew Scott as the articulate, sarcastic M is a brilliant foil to John’s mumbling indecision. The actors’ pitch-perfect performances increase the intensity of Bartlett’s small claustrophobic world.

The Observer, by Susannah Clapp, 22 November 2009

Staged in the round, circular in motion, concentrated on the smallest of spaces. Cock (good title) is one of the most distinguished pieces of theatre to hit the London stage in the past year. Mike Bartlett’s play, which involves a young man torn between his long-term male partner and a young woman he has recently come to love, is arresting. But James Macdonald’s direction and four superb actors take the play into a different realm.

On a bare wooden stage (which Ikea might have created a minute earlier), male and female lovers confront each other without props. They talk about making love but remain fully clothed. They fiercely quarrel but don’t touch each other. The action of the play first between two men, then between a man and a woman is like a slow tango, with words. Ben Whishaw proves himself far more interesting on stage than on screen. When being John Keats in Bright Star he relied so much on close-ups that he barely moved his face. Here he makes his own close-ups: you can see every decision, or failure of decision (not for nothing has he played Hamlet) peeling off his face. Katherine Parkinson has been an outstanding, grumpy Masha in Ian Rickson’s radiant production of The Seagull, and a wonderfully funny dim-going-on-shrewd receptionist in Doc Martin on TV. Here she is both alluring and faintly irritating as the girl who disrupts a gay couple’s life: disarming and clever, she has a humorous aura because her lover bewilderingly has described her to his partner as “manly”.

For the hour-and-a-half of this play, there is no overt physical action no stripping, no violence, other than a bit of a cuff – yet the intense focus is unmatched, the latest sign of a soaring Royal Court.

Variety, by David Benedict, 19 November 2009

Terse, bold, blunt, emblematic of masculinity and, above all, sex, the word “cock” is also a British slang abbreviation for “cock and bull story,” as in a succession of lies. Part of the excitement of Mike Bartlett’s riveting new play is that it delivers on every one of those connotations. The only thing not conveyed by the title is that the writing is matched by James Macdonald’s brilliantly acted, arrestingly funny production.

If the title is provocative, the play’s (in)action sits safely within the traditional territory of a love triangle. John (Ben Whishaw) is in a long-standing relationship with M (Andrew Scott) but realizes he wants out. A week later he’s back for forgiveness, solace, oh, and: “I think I’m in love and I want help because she’s mad.”

It’s a surprise to all parties. John tells W, the woman in question (Katherine Parkinson), that he’s never really looked at women. “I find them a bit like water when you want beer.”

Whatever the flavor, John drinks and the play follows his ensuing saga of sex, lies and vacillations up to a deliciously ghastly dinner for all parties at which John promises to make a choice. However, the surprisingly simple plot, which includes the arrival of M’s father F (Paul Jesson), is barely the half of it. Bartlett’s manner counts easily as much as his subject matter.

John’s concurrent relationships and, crucially, the edited versions he tells each party, are presented with only the minimum of explanation. With immediate jump-cuts between scenes, the audience is constantly in the engrossing position of playing catch-up.

More precisely, within each scene, all extraneous, naturalistic setups have been removed. Dialogue is cut to the quick with surgical precision down to the characters’ most vivid and basic thoughts and needs. The effect — frank and often hilarious — is like watching “Private Lives” on fast-forward, albeit it with saltier language.

Macdonald’s production does away with all props and never stoops to mime. This pumps up the intensity of every exchange as the actors circle each other on Miriam Buether’s set, which reconfigures the auditorium into a — all puns evidently intended — cockpit. These lovers are presented not just as partners, they’re sparring partners held, like the audience, beneath Peter Mumford’s unchanging bright light.

Tender or tortured, every scene is a bout in which punches are verbal, not physical. Yet the stripped-down physical language is amazingly expressive. John’s nervous but increasingly excited first heterosexual experience is genuinely erotic, a feat of directorial bravura considering not a stitch of clothing is removed, neither of them touches the other, and all they do is lock eyes, sway and, well, act.

It’s tangibly evident that every thought and beat in the text has been mined. We know when John is saving his skin by lying not only because we’ve seen him say something else earlier, but because everyone’s hidden thought processes are made so hilariously legible.

Whishaw’s typically febrile approach works particularly well. Hangdog and hopeful, rubbing his face as if trying to discover the man beneath his own skin, he’s a walking indecision. He’s matched by a note-perfect Parkinson, whose strong suit is plaintive, a quality her character quietly uses to wield power. And bluff Jesson nicely captures the protective father caught on the paradox of trying to keep his son’s male lover off the straight and narrow.

Yet it’s Scott as the maddened boyfriend on the brink of being left who unwittingly dominates.

Scott, who played twin brothers for Macdonald in the Royal Court premiere of Christopher Shinn’s “Dying City,” makes wholly unexpected choices with line readings. He brings high-pitched astonishment to a bald statement of fact, ringing sincerity to a line begging to be drenched in irony. But the result feels wholly truthful and unactorly. That, combined with his rare ability to embody contradictory states, makes M’s defiance and vulnerability heartbreaking.

Bartlett’s even-handed approach threatens to suggest that gay vs. straight sexuality is an equal battle. But what looks like a struggle between say, the lure of the “normal” life versus the iconoclasm of gay relationships turns, far more interestingly, into a matter of personality, not politics.

“Cock” is clearly indebted to later work by Caryl Churchill, especially “A Number,” which did for cloning what Bartlett does here for bisexuality. But at the age of 28, he’s more than allowed to show his influences. His previous plays heralded real talent. Bartlett now proves that his time has, well, come.

4 stars What’s On Stage, by Michael Coveney, 19 November 2009

Highly talented Mike Bartlett’s last play at the Royal Court, My Child, was designed with lavish indulgence in a tube train compartment-cum-coffee-house in a segment of the downstairs area.

The same designer, Miriam Buether, has now turned the Upstairs studio into a mini wooden cockpit, seating just ninety customers, to watch Bartletts cunning, intense contest – yes, its another tug-of-love for the affection of whippety, sexually conflicted John.

The play’s sold out because John is played by Ben Whishaw who, apart from starring as John Keats in the new Jane Campion movie, has rapidly compiled a portfolio of daring theatre work as an Old Vic Hamlet and in notable plays by Philip Ridley and collaborations with Katie Mitchell.

And maybe the title, too, is a draw in some (hind) quarters. But this show is not what it says on the tin, and certainly not a load of old whatsit, either.

Director James Macdonald is very good at making transparent surfaces of dialogue ripple and glint with danger, and Wishaw and his dominant lover, labelled just M, but no Bond man, is played with matching brilliance by quick-as-a-flash Andrew Scott. Their opening joust is a joy to behold.

John meets a girl, W, an attractive singleton who says he looks like a pencil drawing and needs colouring in. Katherine Parkinson makes this sound funny and touching, not daft, and totally belies Johns description of her to the seething M as a hirsute manly creature from the black lagoon.

Women are like water when a man wants beer, says John, struggling to understand his own sexuality but relieved to find someone who doesn’t needle or belittle him. His naked dance of coition with W is genuinely sexy without a finger lifted or a garment removed.

It’s all a tough fought battle, especially when M makes it a foursome by asking round his Dad (the totally filled-in Paul Jesson – no line-drawing, he – who makes stodginess a virtue) for dinner.

Performed without furniture or props on small green disc in this Ikea-like wooden O, the plays a small diamond, and Whishaw wrings more angst and confusion out of the role than he did from his own too pubescent Dane.