COCK
COCK, Red Line Productions & Mardi Gras Festival at the Old Fitz Theatre, 6 February-6 March 2015. Photography by Tim Levy: above Michael Whalley and Matilda Ridgway; right: Matt Minto and Michael Whalley.
English playwright Mike Bartlett’s hugely successful play (Royal Court, New York, Melbourne, Brisbane) finally reaches a Sydney stage thanks to the newly-minted independent Red Line and fabled NZ director Shane Bosher. He’s cast two fine previously unknown (to us) NZ actors in Michael Whalley and Matt Minto alongside the consistently excellent Matilda Ridgway and, after an unwell Nicholas Eadie withdrew 36 hours before opening night: heroic replacement Brian Meegan.
The play is part of the 2015 Mardi Gras Festival and, as the provocative title suggests, it’s about sex and sexuality, but anyone attending hoping to be outraged or titillated will be disappointed. Cock is not so much a sex romp as 50 Shades of Emotional Manipulation.
Played in-the-round without scenery or props on a white-walled, white-painted stage with a semi-circular row of white chairs facing the customary rows of bleachers, the design makes the most of the Fitz’s tiny auditorium. At the same time, the simple bright lighting rig and cuts to almost-black between scenes and Bosher’s careful choreography of the actors focuses maximum attention on Bartlett’s witty one-liners and sharply drawn characters.
In the opening scenes the relationship between John (Michael Whalley) and stockbroker M (Matt Minto) is seen to be disintegrating after seven years of growing power imbalance. Even as he professes love, M cannot resist lashing out with razor-edged verbal bullying, while John is quickly revealed as a master of doe-eyed passive aggression. It allows him to push John far enough to make it possible that leaving M is inevitable and not John’s decision at all.
Meanwhile, at the bus stop on his way to work each day (job unspecified – very little is sketched let alone coloured in beyond the immediate) John has noticed, met and chatted with W (Matilda Ridgway), a divorcee whose loneliness is poignantly admitted when they discuss the misery of weekends as a newly solo person.
Before long John is exploring the hitherto unknown territory of W in a sex scene of great humour, truth and humanity – brilliantly written and enacted. And thus the triangle is set up because, when John is with W he wants her and when he goes back to see M, he wants him. And whatever is right there in front of him in the moment is what happens, or not. John makes dithering and truth avoidance into art forms.
Although the temptation to take to John with a meat cleaver is almost overwhelming, he is nevertheless a curiously attractive creature – just profligate to a maddening degree with his default state of profound indecision. He is all things and nothing to each of his loves and as the three are further embroiled and revealed, there can be few in an audience who don’t sweat or wriggle in pained recognition. And the three actors are utterly convincing in achieving this level of audience participation.
To bring matters to a head M insists that W be invited to dinner at the luxurious apartment he’s shared with John all these years (although it is his – M’s – apartment, make no mistake about that). For reasons best known to the dramatist, W walks willingly into this tender trap only to find that M has also invited his father, for moral support. And when he appears it’s pretty obvious that everything M has ever picked up about emotional tyranny was first discarded by his dear old sweetly deceptive dad (Brian Meegan – already a powerful and disturbing sweetly malign presence just two shows into the run).
Although Cock is ostensibly about the gay and the straight and the in betweens, it’s really much more interesting as an exploration of power, especially the power of the apparently weak over the apparently strong, and the despotism of emotional passivity. John is a distorted mirror in whom both W and M see what they hope and want to see, but he cannot see himself in the shimmering uncertainty of his permanent state of vacillation.
It’s exasperating and fascinating by turns when not out and out funny or curiously touching. Definitely worth seeing, that’s for sure.
