Cock

I went to see a play called Cock at the Royal Court Theatre on Friday night. It’s annoying that it has such a provocative title. It was such a good, complex play, that I just want to concentrate on writing about it, and pretend it’s called something really bland. Any puns I happen to come up with are unintentional (which is the only way I tend to pun successfully anyway).

The play was about a man, John (Ben Whishaw), who lives with his unnamed boyfriend (M, played by Andrew Scott), and cheats on him with a woman (W, Katherine Parkinson). The first part of the play consists of scenes between John and M, charting the deterioration of their relationship, with the time lapse between each scene marked with a weird quiz-show-type noise. Then we see what he has been describing to M: meeting W, having sex with her, and telling her it’s over with the man. It all comes to a head (oops) at a dinner party, to which M has invited his father (F, Paul Jesson) ‘for backup’, as John had told M that the very feminine W was ‘quite manly’.

It was set in the round, with a green circle as the stage, and the audience in tiered, bare wooden seating. The fluorescent lighting evoked queasiness. The dialogue was fast-paced, ultra witty, and often very funny. There were not only no props, but also not much ‘doing’. Most events, such as passing wine or a coat, or a slap in the face, and even sex scenes, were described or insinuated very skilfully with speech and sounds. It was very effective, proving that having to imagine a scene can be more powerful than seeing it. This minimal approach also helped to emphasise the fact that it was very much a play about John’s psychological state.

There were a few moments when it seemed that dialogue was overcompensating for this lack of ‘doing’. For example, it did not seem essential that John needed to spell out the fact that M invited F to the dinner party because he was insecure. There were also times when the script seemed a bit too self-aware, such as John (or M, can’t recall which) pointing out that John’s ‘problems’ were insignificant compared to those of people living in developing countries. The conclusion was that they were lucky to have enough food and water, yes, but that John’s problems did matter after all. I wondered if this was necessary, or if it was just the playwright’s sudden (and understandable, I think) need to justify that what he was writing about was important enough.

This is just nit-picking, anyway. The play made the excellent point that who you love is more important than what you are. Common sense, maybe, but presented in such a lucid and moving way. John’s relationship with W is set up as being loving and tender. She makes him feel ‘his age’. A kiss between them near the end is one of the only actions that is done, rather than described. M, on the other hand, makes him feel stupid; like he is a pet. To break up with M and stay with W seems like the only sensible option.

But the play was also about the fact that John has no idea who he is, as he explains in a brilliant speech about never knowing what to wear and being a different person depending on who he is with; about ‘not having a personality’, unlike most other people. So he ends up staying with M. His sense of identity is clearly so messed up that he would rather stick with the life in which he has an assigned place: as a gay man. He stays, because it’s ‘easier’. The final scenes of John’s almost exasperating drawn-out indecision and crouching on the floor, holding his head, stand for him mourning the rest of his life. He knows what he’s thrown away by going for appearances and superficial belonging over something much more meaningful.

I haven’t seen a huge number of plays this year, and the ones I have seen have all been of a very different style to Cock, but this was the best play I’ve seen this year, by quite a large margin.