Mike Bartlett’s play Cock finds its main character paralyzed by ambivalence, in love with two people: his long-term boyfriend and a woman he’s just 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 investigation of desire, sexuality, and identity.
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 hunt-and-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, however, is stunningly raw, having distilled the battle to its essentials: the play unfolds on a bare stage in a tightrope of language and rhythm, with sudden thrusts of fragmented thoughts and parries of desperation and contradiction. Bruising and forthright, these characters are masters of sizing up their opponents and going for the kill, like the eponymous feathered fighters Bartlett modeled them on. The play’s theatrical mode leaves them nowhere to hide, magnifying the vulnerability and brutality of their exchanges.
More than a meditation on sexuality or identity politics, Cock is an unflinching examination of the vertiginous and seemingly provisional nature of identity itself. It’s not that John’s tentative about choosing a partner, exactly, but that he doesn’t know how to consider the choice when he feels like such a different person with each of his lovers.
The play is unflinching 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 with seemingly limitless ways to be happy.