COCK

The title of Mike Bartlett's intriguing new play at the Royal Court's small upstairs space is certainly provocative, if not necessarily appropriate. It isn't really about sex.
COCK is a pared down four character play presented, at the author's request, without sets, furniture or props. The space has been converted into a kind of mini arena, a circular space with the audience on cushioned benches looking down at a small, bare playing area. We watch a series of psychological battles over a young man who admits he doesn't know who he is or what he wants. In a very telling speech, he remembers that when he was young, he loved to imitate other people's voices, but when he was finished, he couldn't remember his own voice He survives by being what people want him to be at any particular moment.
John (Ben Whishaw playing the only character given a name) is in a seven year, turbulent relationship with his partner (Andrew Scott). Said partner often voices his frustration at John's total fecklessness. At the beginning of the play, John is moving toward breaking up with his partner, but such a definite decision with lasting consequences is beyond him. In the brief hiatus in their relationship, John starts an affair with a twenty-eight-year-old divorcee (Katherine Paarkinson), his first with a woman. Said woman is even more needy and manipulative than John's male partmer and John yoyos back and forth between the two, being, to put it mildly, less than honest about his feelings. He tells her that he wants to leave his partner (not totally true) and tells his partner than his girlfriend is very masculine (definitely not true). At a dinner from hell, John's partner and girlfriend fight it out over him (with the help of partner's father who has been called in for reinforcement) and try to get him to make a decision. Girlfriend offers him a "normal life" with a doting wife, kids, and family Christmas which she thinks trumps anything the partner can offer. Partner offers him basically anything he wants, including adopted children, as long as he'll stay in the relationship, but John has no idea what he wants. The father keeps saying "Decide who your are," which is exactly what John can't do. Of course, John finally decides on what is easiest.
The question is not so much why John is the way he is as why this man and woman want to be paired up with him. Their neediness, their hunger to have a partner and settled life even if the partner is, as they both admit, a mess, is the saddest aspect of the play. In this battle between partner and girlfriend, no one can win anything worth having.
Ben Whishaw is excellent as the cipher. Scrawny, homely, messy and with a tendency to collapse into a heap on the floor, he captures John's emptiness, his narcissism and his flashes of cruelty. As his partner, Andrew Scott, as usual, comes close to acting everyone else off the stage. He is one of the most fascinating actors working in British and Irish theater. If only the director had found an actress who could be a worthy adversary for Scott. Katherine Parkinson has made her name playing the stupid, inept, goofy receptionist on the tv sitcom DOC MARTIN. She comes close to playing the same character here. She simply isn't up to being on the stage stage with Whishaw and Scott and this throws the play a bit off balance. They seem to love acting: she seems to be doing a job.
What most critics first notice about COCK is that it is a reversal of the common formula for gay drama in which a married man finds he is in love with another man and the wife fights a losing battle to get him back. However, sexual orientation is not the issue here. John recalls at one point that coming out at university suddenly gave him an identity. It may not have totally fit, but it was something. This is a picture of a total mess (his girlfriend says that she can see space garbage circling around his head) and the needy, lonely people foolish enough to settle for such a mess of pottage.
Bartlett's writing is spare, funny, but deeply sad at the core. The story may verge on sitcom at times but Bartlett never lets the play go there. He tries to balance particularity with universality. The fact that John's partner and girlfriend aren't given names suggests a generic rather than particular reading and there is a tendency to stereotype -- the gay partner is well educated, financially comfortable, collects art, cooks well has a powerful sense of irony and a gift for bitchiness. At the same time he seems a more specific and sympathetic character than the woman, but that is partly because of what Andrew Scott brings to him.
This is a character study of profoundly lost, lonely people with brilliant acting from the gifted male leads.
COCK by Mike Bartlett, directed by James MacDonald, designed by Miriam Buethner. At the Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs. Ben Whishaw, Andrew Scott, Katherine Parkinson and Paul Jesson. December 19, 2009.