Cock

When John takes a break from his long-term boyfriend, he accidentally meets the girl of his dreams. As John tries to shed the labels he’s felt so comfortable with for a long time, the darkly comical forces of his indecision come to a head in a dramatic dinner party confrontation. Cock is an exploration of sexual identity in a world of endless possibilities. It is also a classic love triangle that depicts the selfishness, cruelty and destructiveness of its central figure.

Cock by British playwright Mike Bartlett began life in 2009. Since that first production, the Olivier Award-winning play has had two major UK revivals and seems differently relevant as issues that were not even discussed a decade ago of sexual fluidity and gender identification are now part of the wider consciousness. Bartlett is a prolific writer. His recent theatre work includes The 47th, which imagines a Trump fightback in the 2024 US election, and an adaptation of Medea.

In charge of the new production of Cock is Théâtres de la Ville associate artist Anne Simon, who was born in Luxembourg and trained at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has been putting contemporary British and American English-language plays on the theatre’s stages for the last 10 years and says that the crisp simplicity of Bartlett’s dialogue and the raw emotions in Cock are a gift for a director and the actors. Her previous productions include Kindertransport in co-production with the Queen’s Theatre, Hornchurch, Stupid Fucking Bird by Aaron Posner and more recently Harold Pinter’s The Hothouse and the interdisciplinary family Christmas show All d’Déieren aus dem Bësch.