15 Minutes from Anywhere presents COCK

Cock is hot, Cock is great

From the get-go, Beng Oh’s direction of Mike Bartlett’s witty work is sharp and arresting. We are thrust into the ring of a domestic dispute between John (Matthew Connell) and his long-term boyfriend, M (Shaun Goss). The dialogue is the kind of whip-crack smart that makes you laugh and consider for a moment the tortured inertia that lingers between the pair and coupledom at large.

Cock plays out like a fight between M and W (Marissa O’Reilly) for the affections of John, but it rapidly reveals itself to be the fighting rounds in John’s own mind that drive the plot, oscillating between the feminine ideal and the comfort of his accepted sexuality.

Shining the light on bisexuality it would seem, John crushes his poignant observation that love is reserved for the individual and not the gender while he still remains wholly inept at choosing his person. I find myself torn between the belief that Cock is a genuine attempt for Bartlett to unpack bisexuality in a world that seeks to rigidly define desire, or a plot that clenches its fists at the insecurity of indecision whilst moonlighting as an intellectual take on sexuality. Despite these feelings, I am raptured in the glory of the performances and dialogue that truly carry this play.

Emily Collett’s costume and staging is minimalist, allowing for the characters to shine, whilst gussying up W and throwing a stern jacket on the judgemental father figure, F (Scott Gooding), to solid effect.

Goss is pure energy, unrelenting in his performance throughout, countering with his grand movements the wilting indecision of Connell’s almost boy wonder. Connell perfectly captures the differing relationships his character has with M and W. With M, he is the lost boy needing direction in discovered territory, and with W he seeks direction like a voracious and able explorer. One is almost rooting for his passage to W, and not for ultra-conservative reasons, but for the new pathway he forges to a would-be maturity.

Having now witnessed O’Reilly’s performance a second time as W in Cock, she takes the character to a more insecure and jaded place. This incarnation of W frets a great deal more, leaking her truth of the wreckage of a past relationship, throwing her hopes and dreams upon John with the intent that his virgin heterosexuality will invoke a new life for her too.

The entrance of Gooding as F late into the play is a great shift in the dynamic of the piece, carting out now generally accepted archaic belief systems to pick apart the revelations of John’s newfound feelings and desires. F’s focus to define and box the individuals before him largely fails, and he enters and exits Cock’sworld like an awkward flashback.

It’s all a bit overwhelming, and in the last gasp of the play, the great question hangs above us all. Quoting critic Michael Billington’s earlier observation, Cock is truly in Schopenhauer’s words, a “tyranny of the weak” – and a spectacular display of it.