Mike Bartlett’s play Cock finds its main character paralyzed by indecision, in love with two people: his long-term boyfriend and a woman he’s only recently met. John’s lovers are known only as M and W, and from this near-schematic narrative structure—one man, two partners—Bartlett crafts a lacerating and disarmingly honest look at the ways desire (and choice) can complicate our sense of who we know ourselves to be.
The play’s title takes on various connotations over the course of the play, referring to the sexual organ, the word’s colloquial British implication of someone who can’t get anything right, as well as to the peck-peck-peck combat that ensues over the course of the play’s short bouts.
Bartlett is unsparing when it comes to throwing his characters into combat. His mode is stunningly raw, distilled to its essentials: The play unfolds on a set without furniture or props, its characters armed only with open space and language—sudden thrusts of fragmented thought, parries of desperation and contradiction. With language both forthright and bruising, these characters are masters of sizing up their opponents and going for the kill, like the eponymous fighting game birds that Bartlett modeled them on. The play’s theatrical mode leaves the characters without anywhere to hide, magnifying the vulnerability and brutality of their exchanges. And for Studio’s first foray into theatre-on-film, Bartlett’s play has a kind of stripped-down theatricality that resonates beyond the screen.
More than a meditation on sexuality or identity politics, Cock is an examination of the vertiginous and seemingly provisional nature of identity itself. It’s not that John is tentative about choosing a partner, exactly. It’s that he can’t begin to think about the choice when he feels like such a different person with each of his lovers.
The play is unflinching, even brutal at times, but is also funny and surprisingly tender, sympathetic to the ridiculous things people will do for love, the infuriation of handing your heart to someone else, and the difficulty of living in a world that promises limitless ways to be happy.
—Adrien-Alice Hansel