Double vision

The Habit of Art
Lyttelton

Cock
Royal Court Upstairs

Award for Nasty Play of the Week goes to Cock. What a strange title. Shifting theatre tickets is a business, like any other, and it’s daft to embarrass your customers at the point of sale. It gets dafter. Mike Bartlett’s play involves a gay man and a straight woman competing for the love of a tedious homosexual narcissist. Mr Narcissus invites both lovers to dinner. (Nothing in this play is remotely believable.) ‘I love you,’ he says to his boyfriend. ‘But sex with her is better.’ Having been awarded five stars as a blow-up doll, the girl begs the self-adoring fool to father her children. The girl’s character makes no sense. Her love for this charmless shallow-boots is a fantasy willed into existence by the writer who wants to examine his fascination with the comforts of bourgeois heterosexuality. The play is steeped in envious longings for family life. It’s also horribly misogynistic. As the pile of girl-baiting insults grew higher, the women in the audience tittered away approvingly which led me to deduce that women are far more committed misogynists than men.

The show’s big attraction is Ben Whishaw, an interesting actor destined for movies rather than the stage where his physical shortcomings are always exposed. Whishaw’s anatomy is a magnificent disappointment. The head of Byron, the torso of Jedward, the legs of Emu. He plays the lead here without exerting himself too much. Aside from its emotional illiteracy and twisted voyeurism, the show’s worst feature is an experimental seating arrangement. Beneath burning spotlights we crammed ourselves into a wooden box arranged around a bear pit in which the actors shouted, spat and fizzled at each other just inches from our faces. Depriving the audience of its anonymity doesn’t draw them into the show. It unsettles and excludes them. I escaped this house of horrors in a fever of nervous bemusement. Ultimately I felt a pang of sorrow for the author. Poor chap. He needs to get on a plane to Malawi pronto and find himself an orphan-broker.