‘Cock’: Getting down to the essential

We’ve got to get away from the idea that it’s good to go to the theater,” said award-winning British playwright Mike Bartlett in an interview before the opening of his provocatively titled play, Cock at London’s Royal Court Theatre. “It isn’t church,” he continued. There’s nothing innately good about it. Most theater is still really bad.”

Arrogant as he may have sounded, his play was a sold-out hit both in London and off-Broadway where it ran a year later. It also went on to win an Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre. Bartlett has always subscribed to the idea that plays “have to appeal to people who do jobs and have lives.” It was this relevance that made it the prime choice for the Red Turnip Theater’s second offering after the success of its critically-acclaimed Closer last October at Whitespace. The brainchild of established actors Ana Abad Santos, Topper Fabregas, Jenny Jamora, Cris Villonco and Rem Zamora, Red Turnip brings to the country what they feel is in short supply — the straight play with contemporary stories that we can relate to.

After seeing the play in New York, Cris Villonco was so overwhelmed that she just had to bring the script home to show the rest of the gang. “My first reading of Cock had me in stitches and literally rolling on the floor,” relates Rem Zamora who was tasked to direct the play.

But don’t think for a minute this is your usual, feel-good, walk in the park comedy. The stage alone is spare and foreboding — a ring fenced in by a knee-high wooden enclosure with gaps for entrances and exits. It evokes the coliseums of Rome where gladiators would battle to their deaths. Or the bullrings of Spain where either man or beast would fall. Actually, the playwright’s inspiration was closer to home — it’s the sabungan or cockfight arena which he encountered during a trip to Mexico. With tiered elevated seating around the stage, the audience looks down at the ring ready to pass judgment.

With the stark set what ensues are intense verbal skirmishes that keep you at the edge of your seat for the next hour and a half. You realize that this is going to be one long fight and there’s that guilty pleasure that just like the Romans of yore, you’re going to enjoy every blow. The first scene is already a prelude to the sparring among the characters when we are introduced to John (Topper Fabregas) and his live-in lover, M (Niccolo Manahan). M appears to be the top who draws circles around John with his priggish, caustic ways to the point where John sees no future in the relationship and calls for a cool-off.

As a bell signals each round, we become witness to a series of “bouts” that get more interesting when W (Jenny Jamora) enters the picture as the girl John meets on the way to the tube and falls in love with after she awakens in him a latent heterosexuality. More skirmishes are in store when John goes back to M with a gift, only to wound him later with news of the affair. To complicate things, he confesses to still desiring M yet cannot drop W altogether. To this ménage a trois comes a fourth participant in the form of F (Audie Gemora), M’s father who is called to rescue his son during the climax encounter where all of them sit down to dinner to settle the messy affair once and for all. 

With every scene, each character comes alive, thanks to the skills of the excellent cast and the deft hand of the director, Rem Zamora, who modestly says that it was a collaborative effort where with every reading he learned a lot from the actors on how the play should go. The blocking was very crucial and this he did well, keeping the actors moving constantly so that whichever side of the ring you were watching it from, you can see the faces of the actors. Rem’s staging kept us enthralled, getting us to invest in the characters — what they had to say and what their points of view were in this dilemma of an indecisive John. It was ingenious how they would circle the stage in a graceful dynamic almost the way boxers would prance and dance in the ring. And when they were out of the ring, even if they were supposed to be off -stage, they were still visible to the audience who could see and feel them still in character reacting to what was going on in the center.

With the theater in the round setup, the spectators are actually also lit, making their reactions visible to everyone including the actors, resulting in actors feeding off the energy of the audience and vice versa, making it an ideal communal experience as theater was meant to be.

It was interesting to see how varied the responses were to the questions posed by the play. There is the debate on John’s sexuality, which for M is obviously gay as they were happy living together for so many years. For W he’s better off straight so that they can have children as they had already planned. For F it’s even a matter of genetics – you are born straight or gay and you just have to behave accordingly, in this case by sticking to the tried and tested relationship with his only son. But for John it’s not so simple. His relationships with both M and W appear to be valid so choosing what his sexuality is to resolve the issue seems to be too much to ask. Is John being selfish and cruel? Or is it society and its norms which are unreasonable? Did the playwright assign letters instead of names to the characters because they could very well be any man, woman or father who would react the same way as society has molded them to be? It’s funny how choosing to be gay used to be the liberal viewpoint but in this case it appears to be a narrow, oppressive stance that has become the establishment. In any case, do we really have to be defined by which gender we prefer or what we do in the bedroom in the first place? Have such definitions that liberated us turned into hindrances instead of paths to freedom and fulfillment?

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Cock will be staged at Whitespace, 2314 Chino Roces Ave. Extension (formerly Pasong Tamo Ext.), Makati on March 7, 14, 21, 28 and April 4 (Friday, 9 p.m.); March 8, 15, 29 and April 5 (Saturday, 8 p.m.); April 5, Saturday at 4 pm; March 9, 16, 23 and April 6 (Sunday, 4 p.m.) and special closing gala on April 6, Sunday, 8 p.m. Tickets are available through Ticketworld (891-9999 or www.ticketworld.com.ph) or Red Turnip Theater (redturniptheater@gmail.com or https://www.facebook.com/RedTurnipTheater).