FringeReview UK 2018
Cock
Chichester Festival Theatre
Genre: Contemporary, Dark Comedy, Drama, Short Plays, Theatre
Venue: Chichester Minerva Theatre
Festival: FringeReview UK
Low Down
Kate Hewitt’s Minerva Chichester revival designed by Georgia Lowe and lit by Guy Hoare. Giles Thomas’ sound is rightly minimal.
Review
Anyone who saw the 2015 Young Vic revival of Mike Bartlett’s Bull will understand why he links Cock with it. Not just through verbal twinning, but a Mexican trip that resulted in both arriving very fast. Whilst the ninety-minute Cock from 2009 is emotionally far from the later, even shorter, altogether nastier cockfight, their aesthetic and feel’s closer than any other two Bartlett plays.
There’s indeed a kind of a bull-ring in Kate Hewitt’s Minerva Chichester revival designed by Georgia Lowe and lit by Guy Hoare in sudden red freezes, where simple red lines mark a diamond apex of confrontation: protagonists swerve near the horseshoe-arranged audience, more intimate even than normal in this space.
Giles Thomas’ sound is rightly minimal. Everything’s in the rhythms of words, the pulse of delivery, loss, intimacy, agonized procrastinations, stand-offs as each take their stand. Bartlett instructs minimal gestures, so passing the wine is purely verbal, sex isn’t touching but a brief low moan and it’s gone, not even five-second friction.
Cock explores Bartlett’s unique gift for stark dilemma that began with his first work Not Talking from 2005. Cock doesn’t possess some of the savage boxing-into concentric squares of Bull or for instance that other office nightmare, the no-way-out Contractions that came just before Cock; let alone King Charles III. Other plays like Earthquakes in London and more subtly last year’s Albion, show the trip-wires people create for themselves, rather than the system, or in the case of Earthquakes, ways to jump out.
Premiered at the Royal Court Upstairs with Katherine Parkinson, Ben Whishaw and Andrew Scott Cock has to sizzle with the kind of energy that space and those actors brought to it.
The prescience of this work in 2009 is less incredible than its timeliness now. As Bartlett points out ‘though we’ve moved on in some ways over the last decade… we seem to have stalled’. There’s still this either/or beating in social consciousness. Gender fluidity almost seems more normalised in theatre casting than our personal lives.
But more than anything else this isn’t about sex; it’s about love. John tries to express this in purely sexual terms. ‘I suppose I like both, but that’s okay isn’t it, that’s okay?’ In the final scene though it goes well beyond.
So after seven years from coming out at uni and with the same man – Matthew Needham’s M – Luke Thallon’s John meets Isabella Laughland’s divorcee classroom assistant W by chance whilst commuting. She’s tender, frank, lovingly accepting, they’re enthralled. She invites him back, knows it’s his first time with a woman. She’s twenty-eight, happy to use ‘he fucks me’ in company. It’s no accident John, the only named character, suggests another diminutive for cock.
We’re initially treated to a sequence with John and M as this relationship’s relayed to Needham’s appalled sense. First John’s broken with him, before W appears: there’s Needham’s dominant articulate broker M and the mildly infantilised John kicking against this. John’s vocality is muted, rises up to challenge only latterly. Then the same time-frame substituting W for M.
John and W’s first sex is sculpted with delicacy and gentleness – ‘gentle’s a key word John uses of W to her face in the differently climactic scene. W’s playing a long game. She denies she’s following him; John admits he can’t stop thinking of her. W’s trump (can we still use that word?) is that with M, feckless John’s always the child. With her he can grow to himself. Bartlett’s even-handed writing shows how M can stifle, how W’s doing something extraordinary with everything to gain, including children, perhaps a house-husband. M desperately rear-guards with everything to lose.
Thallon’s John havers in a wrenched face, as the sequencing alternates more freely till we’re at a beef and red wine dinner M’s expertly cooked to thrash it out. Typically John separately tells them both he’s decided for them alone.
The deal-breaker’s unexpected. Simon Chandler’s F: M’s widower father. No stereotype, he embraces his only child as gay, talks of the appalling ignorance in his own youth; declares love for John. He fights ferociously objectifying W. Even though W disarmingly points out he’s scanning her as if naked ‘looking at my tits… but that’s OK.’ This objectifying of W reaches its apogee as John expresses to the two men wondrously: ‘Her vagina is amazing.’ W’s unfazed.
After several reversals there’s – a cheesecake. That’s not the end. Did I say it was funny too? As John drains choice out of himself in a rictus of hesitation he’s asked to affirm a simple ‘yes’ to a mundane question: to enforce the chosen one’s dominance. Just here it’s unnervingly like Bull. You wonder if he’ll stay with his choice, as he quivers, as if to bolt.
The cast’s consummate. Needham’s desperate, articulate, assured mask is a crumble of desperate ploy and last-minute redoubts, sudden abjurations that reverse. Thallon’s ambivalence wobbles between boyishly withdrawn role-play and bursts of clear-headed rationale. Must he choose? Bartlett’s refusal to stack this either as home-wrecking, home-making or even baby-making leaves Thallon exposed not simply as immature: he’s someone genuinely able to desire both, though sexually coming down in favour of W. Hoare’s spotlighting at the end catches someone split apart.
Chandler’s clear-headed F just a beat behind the latest sexual politics veers between sweet liberalism and a faint misogynistic snarl undercut by an attraction W taunts him with. Laughland’s W though is both warm and faintly inscrutable. Her unabashed courage, her willingness to set everything aside, makes her worth rooting for too. A superb revival of Bartlett’s warmest, most ground-breaking, perhaps most enduring play so far.
