This show makes you want to live your life. It makes you appreciate the one who puts up with your nonsense, and your mistakes. It makes you want to tell the one you love how you can't wait for the future to build something with them. It makes you want to go out in the rain and run through the streets like you're in a Bridget Jones movie - but then you trip and stumble and realise you've grazed your hand and it's raw and the painful throb has overtaken your initial enthusiasm. Instead, you find shelter and wait it out and wonder what you were doing.
Cock by Mike Bartlett is a fantastically written and fast-paced masterpiece that explores John's (Aidan deSalaiz) relationship breakdown with M (Michael Torontow) and his exploration of a new relationship with W (Tess Benger).
The show starts as the first audience member knocks on the door, and you'll enter a red room, as John & M ready themselves for their first verbal battle. They're jumping up and down, doing press-ups, and psyching themselves for what will be an intense journey. The immediacy pulls you into their world and it's a good technique for a show so focused on the personal.
The dialogue often plays out like a stream of consciousness that is interrupted and reversed in the opposite direction. As the characters explore their feelings, they move away when they are opposed and closer when they connect or interact more intimately. The visualisation is further enhanced by the light switches around the room that illuminate and exhaust, and it works well for the staging.
The set design is minimal, with no props, but what they do use is more than enough. The privacy curtain highlights the thin barrier between audience and stage. The in-the-round performance puts you at the heart of the drama. You feel ready to pick a side and give your opinion, if you were only asked. You don't need to see the mentioned cheesecake to feel the weight and importance of it. Likewise, with the intimacy scenes, you don't need to see the actors become intimate to hear the intimacy.
Aidan and Michael have to perform like cassettes in a hi-fi, constantly rewinding their emotions and switching sides as they go from humorous to angry to confused in mere instants.
The on-stage chemistry both verbally and physically between the love triangle is a thrilling dance. The costumes, whilst simple, are perfect. M wears black, F wears white, and John wears grey for the dinner. Whereas earlier in the show M and F both wear black boots and tight dark jeans to mirror each other. To John they are both attractive to him as individuals, but when made to decide he's forced to see them as night and day.
Tess Benger's physical performance is extremely impressive, and her emotional expression is marvellous. She is magnificent in the role.
The play's introduction of F as the father of M (Kevin Bundy), gives a final twist and there's a subtle conversation about the fact that when he dies, M will be alone. Whereas F promises a future with a full family. It's the undercurrent themes that catch you, and make you think.
The show explores relationships, heterosexuality, homosexuality, the spectrum in-between, and strips it back to, what kind of person do you love? It leaves you with so much to discuss, and I think that's the most powerful theatre, especially when it is so enjoyable to experience.
The company should be immensely proud of this production, and I would recommend you see it at the COLAB Theatre where it runs until 2 May 2026.
Review: James Dix