OK OK I'll stop fishing for cheap laughs but in my defence, Mike Bartlett did choose a quite provocative title for his latest play.
I've already hinted in my tweets that I quite liked this play. Anything that has Ben Whishaw in it is going to immediately win points and, well, Cock was wonderfully entertaining.
The Jerwood Upstairs performance space is so intimate that it immediately felt special. It's in the round block stepped-seating and the stage is about the width of my living room. The actors are so close you hardly dare move. There are no props, scenery, fancy lighting or sound it is just the audience and actors.
The story centres on John (Whishaw) who lives with his long term boyfriend M (Andrew Scott). The relationship is on the rocks and John meets and sleeps with a woman (W, played by Katherine Parkinson of the IT Crowd). He decides to confess his infidelity and mend his relationship with M but is still drawn to W and cannot quite give her up.
M decides to force John into choosing and invites W to dinner with the two of them in order have the whole thing out. But what he doesn't tell John is that he's also invited his Dad (Paul Jesson) to the dinner party for moral support.
It is both very funny and sad. John is at the same time irritatingly indecisive and endearing as he struggles with his feelings for both M and W.
I've wanted to see Whishaw in something that had more humour in it for a while now and this certainly fitted the bill. He turned in a great performance as they all did. I'll forgive Jesson for forgetting his lines and needing a prompt as I'm continually impressed by actors ability to learn their lines. And one of the waitresses I got chatting to in the cafe bar beforehand endeared me to the entire cast by saying how lovely they all were singling out Mr Whishaw and the nicest person you could ever meet, "not like the lot in The Priory*". (Curious, I asked "are they up themselves then?" and she said "yes".)
But anyway I digress. Cock isn't on for very long and can only accommodate a small audience so it's no surprise that it has now sold out and I am more glad than I can express that I gambled on liking it and booked to see it twice.
Second visit will be in just over a weeks time and has a Q&A with the director and cast afterwards. Excited moi?
Oh and here are a few other reviews from the pro's who probably aren't quite as biased about Whishaw as I am.
Guardian "You may, according to taste, find the title a come-on or a turn-off. But, far from being a sensational shocker, Mike Bartlett's play is a sharp, witty study of a man helplessly torn between his longtime male partner and a loving woman."
Variety "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."
The Stage But although the text is a compelling account of emotional confusion and the struggle to comprehend the nature of love, Bartlett’s idea of having a bare stage and no props, realised here in James Macdonald’s experimental production, using designer Miriam Buether’s bear-pit set, has mixed results.