Before I saw Mike Bartlett's Cock (and I'm going to make an attempt to avoid all possible puns) in the last week of its run I’d really wanted to dislike it: because of its name, because of its popularity in the newspaper reviews. Thankfully it wasn’t to be so, and I felt strongly in favour of the piece by the end, I liked it, even.
It seems possible, however, that to enumerate my several reservations, here, might productively contribute to whatever is this repetitive strain.
The piece centred around a man, John (Ben Whishaw), who has committed an infidelity with a woman, 'W' (Katherine Parkinson), and told his male partner, 'M' (Andrew Scott), and has promised both that he will end relations with the other.
It was very funny. As in Simon Stephen’s Sea Wall, Andrew Scott’s performance, and especially his Irish accent, lent a great warmth to the performance, which at times felt slightly too seductive. There’s nothing like comedy for instantly identifying a consensus and a hierarchy of thought, an us and a them, and the orthodoxy here felt chauvinistic. It’s an allegation made against gay men I have heard before - that they don’t need women, so they don’t respect them, and that’s why catwalk models are so skinny & c & c. Some of the humour depended on the reversal of a more ‘typical’ situation in which it is the gay relationship which is the shameful: John is agonised at the thought of his female lover coming to his workplace. This notion is predicated on the idea, and wrong I think, that being gay has been totally normalised.
The play’s love triangle structure immediately recalls Pinter’s Betrayal, and before that, Racine’s Andromache, and it is a really viable attempt to newly write this human situation. The geometry of Bartlett’s play is disrupted by the arrival of a fourth, and largely inconsequential character: shortly before the dinner at which John is going to have to tell his two lovers which he is going to commit to, there is a knock on the door, and his male lover admits he has called his father for ‘backup’. This seems a daring joke, a very modern moment of bathos, unfortunately the flaws in the father character – whether badly written or badly acted or badly directed – was the greatest disappointment of the evening. His main speech, in which he sets out what it is to be gay in our society, is largely a succession of clumsy psychoanalysis and sham genetics.
The plays’ several explicitly political moments troubled me: a character talks about the starving in Africa (as if repeating a generalised concern for an entire continent in any way productively contributes to the debate), another by the father about how he says grace since he saw the thing on the telly about Bangladesh ‘or whatever’. In this way voicing the opinion that we are unrelated to ‘the third-world’ un-relates us. An argument over who should eat a satsuma could think more productively about politics than the occasional reference to wars abroad, or the needy at home. Pretending to care about foreign affairs or domestic civil liberties infringements should not be a necessary part of contemporary theatre-writing.
At another point in the play, 'M' tells John: ‘I would torture for you’, and we return to the debate voiced in my earlier post on Dennis Kelly, that is to say, the glib equivalence asserted between love and human rights abuses. The attempt to exclude forms of fascism from love is more honestly made in the poetry of Keston Sutherland, in light of whose work these plays appear dully complacent, as if it were not possible in the theatre to really want something.
In the context of the totally pathetic thing raging at the moment between Boris Johnson and the Ben Bradshaw, over whose candidate should run Arts Council London, it seems that the politicisation of art within mainstream British politics is inevitably accompanied by a neutralisation.
Cock’s playtext begins: ‘There is no scenery, no props, no furniture, and no mime. Instead the focus is entirely on the drama of the scene.’ This play is making a claim for purifying our focus on what drama is. I liked that the clothes worn in the piece could have been the actors’ own. It has decided drama is not things, but bodies and speech.
In between scenes Ben Whishaw drinks from a water bottle on the desk of the prompter, in full view of the entire audience. This act, however unaudacious it is in light of more experimental performances elsewhere, encourages me.
In spite of this, we are told things like characters are sitting when they are still standing, or take of their jacket when they are wearing no jacket. This constant interplay between what is being acted, what enacted, and what is not being done at all, felt at times tiresome. There is a joke about a fake dog , which is vaguely gestured towards at the side of the stage. But of course it is not there: it is a fake fake dog.
Dramaturgies are often predicated in what is present and visible, what is absent and what we are asked to imagine. John asks his partner, ‘M’, take off your top. Andrew Scott does not move, but John says thank you, and we are asked to imagine ‘M’ has. Had he actually done it his real shivering body - so close - would have made an extraordinary dramatic moment, when ‘M’ asks whether he has made his decision now, and John says: Yes. Yes. I think. Yes. The decision to underplay the extremity of such moments is one thing, but the decision that theatre consists of people just standing and talking, is less defensible. This asking us to imagine where no act of imagination is theatrically necessary, emphasises the extent to which this model of theatre is still undecided, uncommitted.
These moments, however, are justified by a strain of meta-theatricality in the play. One character talks of ‘a personality – a character’. John (or was it Ben Whishaw?) is told, about ten times, to ‘be yourself’. This is beyond a joke. The (relative) lack of conventional boundaries between audience and actor is undermined by this need to claim that we are all essentially actors a lot of the time: performing gender, sexuality etc.
At points I wondered whether the dilemma existed only for that the wrong questions were being asked. John explains his confusion in actorly terms: imitating other peoples’ voices until you can’t remember what your own one is. The conceit at the centre of the play is this: imagine you are an actor who can suddenly no longer work out whether you are playing a role, or being yourself. I’d be more tempted, perhaps predictably, to imagine the dilemma at the heart of this play to be less about sexuality than the theatre.
The model for theatre envisaged at the Royal Court seems to be that a playtext is produced as ‘new writing’, then reproduced as ‘new writing’ theatre. This places the newness of the playwright at its centre, to the exclusion of those other elements central to what theatre is: dramaturg, director, actor, audience. For me this is a fallacy: Derrida said ‘writing is inaugural’, and the idea that writing could be done without the act of imagining the theatre for which finger touches keypad (etc.), seems naïve, even regressive. Far better to write for a new theatre than new writing for an old theatre.
One of the play’s most sustained motifs is the notion of ‘going round in circles’. The movement, of actors within the ply-wood cock-pit theatre constructed ‘Upstairs’, is eloquently choreographed. They encircle one another in small, quiet steps, enter or leave through one of the two exits, or ‘sit out’ one scene on the stairs at the side. But the presence of the father character confuses the subtle balance of earlier movements: the dialogue doesn’t viably extend to a foursome, the square stands uneasily within the circle.
One character exclaims: Are we all waiting for something to happen? It struck me that there were points at which the piece was felt meta-theatrical where it should only have been theatrical. This play privileges the dilemma whilst urging it towards a solution, paradoxically admitting the impossibility of saying anything productive whilst waiting for a conclusion. The wrong questions have been asked, staged with almost maximum effectiveness.
That not knowing is at the heart of this play. The challenges made to the self of the person who finds themselves in love with two people; the challenges a theatre-writer poses to his own theatre practice.
The play’s achievements were most clear at the point ‘W’ made a last attempt to secure John’s commitment, sketching out the possibilities of their future together. She remembers their shared plans to travel to Paris, talks about becoming pregnant, she names their children, and numbers their grandchildren, even though she remains nameless. The absurd sentimentalism of this vision of heterosexual life is, by this point, laughable, and the greatest act of brutality: what the play had done to our vision of the possibility of happiness in a life together.
It seems possible, however, that to enumerate my several reservations, here, might productively contribute to whatever is this repetitive strain.
The piece centred around a man, John (Ben Whishaw), who has committed an infidelity with a woman, 'W' (Katherine Parkinson), and told his male partner, 'M' (Andrew Scott), and has promised both that he will end relations with the other.
It was very funny. As in Simon Stephen’s Sea Wall, Andrew Scott’s performance, and especially his Irish accent, lent a great warmth to the performance, which at times felt slightly too seductive. There’s nothing like comedy for instantly identifying a consensus and a hierarchy of thought, an us and a them, and the orthodoxy here felt chauvinistic. It’s an allegation made against gay men I have heard before - that they don’t need women, so they don’t respect them, and that’s why catwalk models are so skinny & c & c. Some of the humour depended on the reversal of a more ‘typical’ situation in which it is the gay relationship which is the shameful: John is agonised at the thought of his female lover coming to his workplace. This notion is predicated on the idea, and wrong I think, that being gay has been totally normalised.
The play’s love triangle structure immediately recalls Pinter’s Betrayal, and before that, Racine’s Andromache, and it is a really viable attempt to newly write this human situation. The geometry of Bartlett’s play is disrupted by the arrival of a fourth, and largely inconsequential character: shortly before the dinner at which John is going to have to tell his two lovers which he is going to commit to, there is a knock on the door, and his male lover admits he has called his father for ‘backup’. This seems a daring joke, a very modern moment of bathos, unfortunately the flaws in the father character – whether badly written or badly acted or badly directed – was the greatest disappointment of the evening. His main speech, in which he sets out what it is to be gay in our society, is largely a succession of clumsy psychoanalysis and sham genetics.
The plays’ several explicitly political moments troubled me: a character talks about the starving in Africa (as if repeating a generalised concern for an entire continent in any way productively contributes to the debate), another by the father about how he says grace since he saw the thing on the telly about Bangladesh ‘or whatever’. In this way voicing the opinion that we are unrelated to ‘the third-world’ un-relates us. An argument over who should eat a satsuma could think more productively about politics than the occasional reference to wars abroad, or the needy at home. Pretending to care about foreign affairs or domestic civil liberties infringements should not be a necessary part of contemporary theatre-writing.
At another point in the play, 'M' tells John: ‘I would torture for you’, and we return to the debate voiced in my earlier post on Dennis Kelly, that is to say, the glib equivalence asserted between love and human rights abuses. The attempt to exclude forms of fascism from love is more honestly made in the poetry of Keston Sutherland, in light of whose work these plays appear dully complacent, as if it were not possible in the theatre to really want something.
In the context of the totally pathetic thing raging at the moment between Boris Johnson and the Ben Bradshaw, over whose candidate should run Arts Council London, it seems that the politicisation of art within mainstream British politics is inevitably accompanied by a neutralisation.
Cock’s playtext begins: ‘There is no scenery, no props, no furniture, and no mime. Instead the focus is entirely on the drama of the scene.’ This play is making a claim for purifying our focus on what drama is. I liked that the clothes worn in the piece could have been the actors’ own. It has decided drama is not things, but bodies and speech.
In between scenes Ben Whishaw drinks from a water bottle on the desk of the prompter, in full view of the entire audience. This act, however unaudacious it is in light of more experimental performances elsewhere, encourages me.
In spite of this, we are told things like characters are sitting when they are still standing, or take of their jacket when they are wearing no jacket. This constant interplay between what is being acted, what enacted, and what is not being done at all, felt at times tiresome. There is a joke about a fake dog , which is vaguely gestured towards at the side of the stage. But of course it is not there: it is a fake fake dog.
Dramaturgies are often predicated in what is present and visible, what is absent and what we are asked to imagine. John asks his partner, ‘M’, take off your top. Andrew Scott does not move, but John says thank you, and we are asked to imagine ‘M’ has. Had he actually done it his real shivering body - so close - would have made an extraordinary dramatic moment, when ‘M’ asks whether he has made his decision now, and John says: Yes. Yes. I think. Yes. The decision to underplay the extremity of such moments is one thing, but the decision that theatre consists of people just standing and talking, is less defensible. This asking us to imagine where no act of imagination is theatrically necessary, emphasises the extent to which this model of theatre is still undecided, uncommitted.
These moments, however, are justified by a strain of meta-theatricality in the play. One character talks of ‘a personality – a character’. John (or was it Ben Whishaw?) is told, about ten times, to ‘be yourself’. This is beyond a joke. The (relative) lack of conventional boundaries between audience and actor is undermined by this need to claim that we are all essentially actors a lot of the time: performing gender, sexuality etc.
At points I wondered whether the dilemma existed only for that the wrong questions were being asked. John explains his confusion in actorly terms: imitating other peoples’ voices until you can’t remember what your own one is. The conceit at the centre of the play is this: imagine you are an actor who can suddenly no longer work out whether you are playing a role, or being yourself. I’d be more tempted, perhaps predictably, to imagine the dilemma at the heart of this play to be less about sexuality than the theatre.
The model for theatre envisaged at the Royal Court seems to be that a playtext is produced as ‘new writing’, then reproduced as ‘new writing’ theatre. This places the newness of the playwright at its centre, to the exclusion of those other elements central to what theatre is: dramaturg, director, actor, audience. For me this is a fallacy: Derrida said ‘writing is inaugural’, and the idea that writing could be done without the act of imagining the theatre for which finger touches keypad (etc.), seems naïve, even regressive. Far better to write for a new theatre than new writing for an old theatre.
One of the play’s most sustained motifs is the notion of ‘going round in circles’. The movement, of actors within the ply-wood cock-pit theatre constructed ‘Upstairs’, is eloquently choreographed. They encircle one another in small, quiet steps, enter or leave through one of the two exits, or ‘sit out’ one scene on the stairs at the side. But the presence of the father character confuses the subtle balance of earlier movements: the dialogue doesn’t viably extend to a foursome, the square stands uneasily within the circle.
One character exclaims: Are we all waiting for something to happen? It struck me that there were points at which the piece was felt meta-theatrical where it should only have been theatrical. This play privileges the dilemma whilst urging it towards a solution, paradoxically admitting the impossibility of saying anything productive whilst waiting for a conclusion. The wrong questions have been asked, staged with almost maximum effectiveness.
That not knowing is at the heart of this play. The challenges made to the self of the person who finds themselves in love with two people; the challenges a theatre-writer poses to his own theatre practice.
The play’s achievements were most clear at the point ‘W’ made a last attempt to secure John’s commitment, sketching out the possibilities of their future together. She remembers their shared plans to travel to Paris, talks about becoming pregnant, she names their children, and numbers their grandchildren, even though she remains nameless. The absurd sentimentalism of this vision of heterosexual life is, by this point, laughable, and the greatest act of brutality: what the play had done to our vision of the possibility of happiness in a life together.
