Cock - Red Line Productions

Overview

As emotional punch-ups go, Mike Bartlett’s Cock (directed by Shane Bosher) is brutal. There’s plenty of sharp wit and awkward charm, but this is a love triangle in which everybody’s hearts get properly stomped on and it’s impossible to tell whether it’s the lovers or the competing parties who are visiting the most damage upon each other.

When John (Michael Whalley), a young gay man, rather skittishly informs his long-term boyfriend, M (Matt Minto), that he’d like to put their relationship on hold, it is with no small surprise that he almost immediately finds himself neck deep in an affair with W (Matilda Ridgway), a divorced woman with the faintest notion that John might be ‘the one’.

With a jilted M circling and a smitten W dreamily planning his future, John, desperate not to have to choose between them, decides not to decide. He leads both of them as far up the garden path as he can before M and W decide to force the issue. At the exceedingly awkward dinner party that ensues, John is forced to make a hard and fast decision not only about his partner but about his sexual identity.

Like all prizefights, Cock is performed in the round in a stark white room with functional lighting and no props. That said, the actors have no trouble filling the space. Whalley’s nervous and naive energy makes his John endearing and sympathetic, even as he begins to employ some fairly detestable measures against those he claims to love. Minto’s M is brusque and sarcastic; he belittles and mocks John mercilessly, so familiar with his partner that he bothers to conceal few of his numerous flaws.

Ridgway produces an excellent performance as W; her warm, focussed calm is a natural counterweight to John’s scatterbrained back-pedalling. Once the gauntlet has been thrown, though, she also shows herself more than capable of going blow for blow with Brian Meegan, who despite being hauled in at the last second as a replacement, emanates a quiet power as M’s father. His measured intractability is of great value at the dinner party, where everyone else is busy losing their heads.

Bartlett’s work has no easy answers to offer about love or identity; one might argue that the end finds John just as conflicted as he was at the beginning. While Cock explores the difficulty of the fight to find love, it is also under no illusion that, once attained, the act of love itself can be just as big a slugfest. Bosher’s stripped-back production works particularly well in a space where the audience can see the sweat. This is an intense night of theatre, but well worth it, particularly if you can bag ringside seats.