Writer: Mike Bartlett
Director: Dylan Trowbridge
Mike Bartlett’s Cock has been around long enough to have acquired a reputation as one of the more testing plays in the contemporary British canon, a 90-minute exercise in romantic torment that refuses to offer its audience the comfort of resolution. This TIFT production, staged in a basement room at COLAB Tower, does the text full justice and then some.
The premise is deceptively simple. John (Aidan deSalaiz) is in a long-term relationship with M (Michael Torontow), a man. He then falls for W (Tess Benger), a woman. Rather than choose, he agonises, equivocates, and in doing so inflicts a slow, unintentional cruelty on both of them. M’s father F (Kevin Bundy) rounds out the four-hander, arriving with his own loud expectations. What sounds like the setup for a relationship comedy turns out to be something altogether darker and more unsettling; a play about desire, identity and the particular damage done by people who want everything and cannot relinquish any of it.
The venue is integral to this production’s success. TIFT have taken a basement room, probably no bigger than a studio flat and turned it into something genuinely confrontational. Around 40 chairs line the four walls, the audience looking inward at a bare concrete floor. No set. No props beyond the four low seats on which the cast occasionally perch. Nowhere to look but at the people in front of you, and nowhere for them to hide from you. It is theatre at its most nakedly exposed, and Dylan Trowbridge’s direction makes the most of every inch.
Trowbridge keeps the staging naturalistic and alive, the movement feeling spontaneous rather than choreographed, which means the tension never lets up and never tips into artifice. The production’s most quietly devastating sequence sees John and W narrating their first sexual encounter from opposite sides of the room, holding each other’s gaze while trading the breathless, tentative language of people finding their way with each other for the first time. It is more intimate, more viscerally charged, than any physical simulation could be, and it lands with an impact that stays with you.
DeSalaiz anchors it all with a performance that earns its central place without dominating: John’s paralysis reads as entirely genuine, a man not playing games but genuinely undone by his own emotional need. Torontow and Benger are equally impressive, each navigating the impossible position of loving someone who cannot give them what they need, and each finding real pathos in the frustration of waiting for a decision that never quite arrives.
Bundy’s F is a different beast entirely. Where the other three circle each other with carefully chosen words and unspoken feelings, F crashes in like a bull who has spotted the china shop from a distance. Loud, coarse, unapologetically male, he says out loud what the audience has been thinking for the past hour and what M and W have perhaps privately thought but lacked the nerve to voice. His arrival cranks the energy up several notches and forces each character to confront the situation with a directness the rest of the play has studiously avoided. It is a gloriously disruptive performance from Bundy, and the production is the better for it.
The play’s refusal to resolve is, of course, the point. Neither M nor W can extricate themselves from John, and John cannot choose between them; what emerges is something close to a portrait of love in its most maddening, recognisable form. Life, as Bartlett seems to suggest, is rarely tidy. People torment each other not out of malice but out of want, and the audience is left to sit with the discomfort of that, drawing their own conclusions in the silence after the lights go down.
At 40 seats a night, this is a production that comparatively few people will get to see. That is their loss.
Runs until 2 May 2026
