Brighton Fringe 2022

Cock

New Venture Theatre, Brighton

Genre: Contemporary, Dark Comedy, Drama, LGBT Theatre, Short Plays, Theatre

Venue: New Venture Theatre Studio

Festival: Brighton Fringe, Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

Anyone who’s seen Mike Bartlett’s 2013 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 Richard Lindfield’s production which by convention’s minimal, but here in the NVT studio without an set at all to distract, lit by Apollo Videaux in either central spotlight or a steady beat: protagonists swerve near the horseshoe-arranged audience, more intimate even than normal in this space.

There’s no sound either. 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 the recent 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. Still, though M’s jibe to John that he ‘straighten it out’ gets the same laugh as in 2009, in Brighton it’s gentler.

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.

John, the only named character, is also paradoxically the one who lacks identity. Taking off accents he recalls, he couldn’t recall his own. This suits M, who rather demeans him and treats him as an impracticable househusband who ‘can’t do anything with your hands.’

So after seven years from coming out at uni and with the same man – Aaron Coomer’s M – Lewis Todhunter’s’s John meets Melissa Paris’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, that 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 Coomer’s appalled sense, measured with an American twang that makes him even more intimidatingly sophisticated – and vocally jabbing. First John’s broken with him, before W appears: there’s Coomer’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. We get one narrative timeline, M with John; then the other parallel with W but of course following.

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.

Todhunter’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 tyranny of the weak. Only Todhunter’s second ever performance, it’s astonishingly assured. He starts edging a little into femme mode, but this dissolves. His hunching and torquing a naturally commanding lean physique, is physically eloquent.

The deal-breaker’s unexpected. Graeme Muncer’s F: M’s widower father. No stereotype, though sounding Essex to his son’s New York, he embraces his only child as gay, talks of the appalling ignorance in his own youth; declares love for John. Muncer’s is a mix of warm bloke urbanity with a sudden lurch into street mode. 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: ‘I don’t want to be crude, but her vagina is amazing.’ W’s blink of astonishment, then realising the value of this, shows her unfazed.  Paris expresses everything in the moment, her eyes say it all before her speech does.  That extends to physical expressivity, the turn of her neck, the quick of anger suddenly melting as W runs towards John.

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. Coomer’s desperate, articulate, assured mask is a crumble of desperate ploy and last-minute redoubts, sudden abjurations that reverse. Coomer’s elan armours against quivering fear; but like W at moments, he’s so exasperated he’s prepared to let John go.

Todhunter’s ambivalence wobbles between boyishly withdrawn role-play and bursts of clear-headed rationale. Taller than Coomer, he curves in a sort of abasement before him.

Must he choose? Bartlett’s refusal to stack this either as home-wrecking, home-making or even baby-making leaves Todhunter exposed not simply as immature: he’s someone genuinely able to desire both, though sexually coming down in favour of W. Videaux’s spotlighting at the end catches someone split apart.

Muncer’s clear-headed F just a beat behind the latest sexual politics veers between sweet liberalism and a misogynistic snarl undercut by an attraction W taunts him with; Muncer’s more emphatic in this than some productions I’ve seen, and it works more viscerally here.

Paris’ W though is both warm and faintly inscrutable. Her unabashed courage, her willingness to set everything aside, makes her worth rooting for too. She’s markedly more sympathetic than M, articulates a future both she and John  have dreamed of privately. Her only weakness is she knows how lonely she is, by laughing it off. A superb revival of Bartlett’s warmest, most ground-breaking, perhaps most enduring play so far.

Published May 20, 2022May 20, 2022 by Simon Jenner