Shocking? No, this love triangle is just tedious: PATRICK MARMION reviews Cock
Cock (Ambassadors Theatre, London)
Verdict: Cock and bull story
Rating: 
Mike Bartlett’s dismally titled 2009 play Cock contains the not-very-shocking revelation that sexuality can, in fact, defy categorisation. Excuse me for not falling off my seat.
But the news does seem to delight and amaze fans flocking to Marianne Elliott’s revival, featuring Bridgerton’s Jonathan Bailey and star of the Elton John film Rocketman, Taron Egerton.
They play two halves of a young gay couple whose relationship is heading south (in a bad way). The play, which originally starred Ben Whishaw and Andrew Scott, sees Bailey take Whishaw’s role of John, a gay man whose relationship with his boyfriend ‘M’ (Egerton) is rocked after he (John) has sex with a woman, ‘W’ (Jade Anouka).
Mike Bartlett’s dismally titled 2009 play Cock contains the not-very-shocking revelation that sexuality can, in fact, defy categorisation
Bailey’s character (if that’s not too strong a word) is a manic Mr Nobody who can’t decide which way to swing. And that, in a nutshell, is the entire plot of this one-and-three-quarter-hour, navel-gazing doodle, scribbled with four-letter profanities.
To wring dramatic life from the monotonous monosyllables, Bailey ties himself in knots, literally and metaphorically: twisting hands, rolling ankles, gurning his handsome features into grimaces in a display of the agonies of awkwardness.
Be warned: there is no sign of smooth-talking Anthony Bridgerton from Netflix’s bawdy bodice-ripper. Instead, on Merle Hensel’s sterile aluminium drum of a set, Bailey is as colourless as an online form before you’ve ticked the Ts and Cs.
As his needy boyfriend, Egerton, making his West End debut, tries to goad John into action using everything he’s got. His huffy ‘M’ hyperventilates with exasperation. Perhaps that’s why he passed out at the first performance two weeks ago.
After nearly an hour of this emotional constipation, Anouka’s ‘W’ comes to the rescue, armed with just her gender and a mauve jumpsuit. Her forthright aura is what turned John’s head.
But she gets bogged down in the same swamp as ‘M’ — only this time, with less talk of the titular organ, and more of graphic gynaecology.
The play, which originally starred Ben Whishaw and Andrew Scott, sees Bailey take Whishaw’s role of John
Enter Phil Daniels as Egerton’s dad, all dressed in brown — corduroy suit, shirt and tie. If anyone can play UN Secretary-General to this rabble, he can, you think.
Old-school, meat-and-two-veg sleazy at first, he tries to save his son’s relationship with Cockney straight-talking. Yet he too sinks into the deadly marsh of John’s procrastination.
Elliott’s production looks slick, and she seeks to illustrate John’s pain by adding stylised movement choreographed by Annie-Lunnette Deakin-Foster.
Although meant to represent John’s sexual angst, it has the coy side benefit of allowing all involved to mime sex at a safe, clothed distance.
What’s needed here is a second act. But like the stage, the play just goes round in circles.
The Red (originaltheatreonline.com)
Verdict: Sweet with notes of brambly acidity
Rating: 
Just as circular, but far less conceited, is teetotal Marcus Brigstocke’s The Red — a semi-autobiographical story about a now-sober man bequeathed a bottle of claret by his father.
Brigstocke is a recovering alcoholic, and this is a canny tale of temptation for Lent. The wine is not just any old red. It is a Chateau Lafite Rothschild 1978 (RRP approx. £500).
Just as circular, but far less conceited, is teetotal Marcus Brigstocke’s semi-autobiographical The Red
Fresh from the funeral, son Benedict reads a note from his dad, encouraging him to quaff the bottle bought on his birthday. Benedict thinks it a lovely idea, but recites a list of people he knows who relapsed…and died.
We never learn why Brigstocke is an alcoholic, but he is candid about its effect on his life — including experiencing the DTs at breakfast, aged 14.
Sam Alexander plays Benedict with a careworn boyishness, opposite his real-life father Bruce. Worth watching online, with or without a glass of red.
Small Island (Olivier, National Theatre)
Verdict: Big themes, big heart
Rating: 
After its acclaimed 2019 run, Rufus Norris’s terrific production of this Windrush-era drama returns with a new cast.
Helen Edmundson’s adaptation of Andrea Levy’s 2004 novel captures its melodrama but also its intimate, human heart, as she tells the intertwined stories of Jamaicans Hortense (Leonie Elliott) and Gilbert (Leemore Marrett Jr), who move to bombed-out postwar London to lodge in a house owned by white Britons Queenie (Mirren Mack) and Bernard (Martin Hutson) — and find the opportunity-laden ‘mother country’ they had imagined doesn’t exist.
We start with the story of the young Hortense, who is sent to live with wealthier relatives, including her pampered cousin Michael (Elliot Barnes-Worrell).
After its acclaimed 2019 run, Rufus Norris’s terrific production of this Windrush-era drama returns with a new cast
We might think we’re moving towards a sweet teenage romance, but the story takes an abrupt turn as Michael departs for England under a cloud.
Hortense later marries Gilbert, who served in the RAF during the war, and when they sail for Britain he’s planning to be a lawyer, she a teacher. But instead of a warm welcome they find racists all around, with the exception of the crass but well-meaning Queenie.
Levy examines racism, colourism (Hortense’s light skin ‘will bring a golden life for I’) and empirism — the small island of the title could refer to Jamaica or Britain — and Edmundson captures the broad sweep of the novel’s themes as well as its comedy.
Elliott is superb as the prissy Hortense, whose girlhood notions of her social standing are cruelly knocked, and Marrett touchingly captures Gilbert’s decency and disappointment, while Mack’s no-nonsense Queenie learns how to survive when the men in her life let her down.
Paul Anderson’s lighting differentiates locations (warm colours for Jamaica, washed-out tones for London), and Katrina Lindsay’s set utilises the Olivier stage’s revolve and depth to the full in evoking a tropical hurricane or wartime bombing raid, as well as domestic interiors.
And the ending, shockingly sad though it is, is shot through with hope. A triumph.
Until April 30.
An Hour And A Half Late (Touring)
Verdict: Too late, too long
Rating:
Griff Rhys-Jones’s Peter has his mac on and keys to the Merc to hand. But Janie Dee’s Laura is running in and out of their Chiswick sitting-room, looking for stuff. Excuses, as it turns out.
She finally throws herself on the sofa and says she feels like she’s on the edge of a precipice.
She’s talking no career, empty-nest syndrome, being a granny at 53, Peter’s imminent retirement. ‘Death is all I’ve got to look forward to,’ she wails. She says she’s terrified. She sounds mildly peeved.
Were these First World problems being expressed by an actor with less charm than beguiling Janie Dee, what amounts to an overstretched sketch about the banality of a long marriage would have felt even longer.
In the dull role of the tax-accountant husband with a heart (and pockets) of gold, Rhys-Jones tirelessly soothes and strokes
But then, Belinda Lang’s adaptation of the French two-hander by Gerald Sibleyras is more concerned with length than depth.
References to vaccination certificates and Bake Off bring it up to date, but it still feels as past-it and irrelevant as Laura does, because there is nothing at stake. The worst that can happen is the dinner date doesn’t go ahead.
In the dull role of the tax-accountant husband with a heart (and pockets) of gold, Rhys-Jones tirelessly soothes and strokes. His big reveal is that he will spend his retirement getting stuck into sticky-toffee-pudding and become unashamedly fat.
The programme includes Griff’s essay drooling over a dessert trolley, ‘a proper, groaning, wheeled pudding vehicle’. Another bizarre hymn to the Seventies.
Laura decides the way forward is to cast off her clinical house-proud tendencies and throw some food around, something Yasmina Reza’s God Of Carnage did better.
I shall cherish the climactic moment when Dee’s liberated Laura fires Hellman’s directly into her mouth, but not the scene in which the couple imagine that their sex lives will be spiced up by separate bedrooms with the sound of a creaking floorboard signalling a night of passion. Very creaky indeed.
Legacy: Maria Friedman And Friends (Menier Chocolate Factory)
Verdict: Warm and wonderful tribute show
Rating: 
As a young singer, Maria Friedman was invited to take part in a star-studded gala in the vast, intimidating Drury Lane Theatre. As she broke into Broadway Baby, a voice yelled from the gallery: ‘Ged off! We want Elaine Stritch.’
‘I thought I was going to die,’ says Friedman. Instead, she ‘went into the lyric, into the story…I was that girl trying to get a job’. It’s Friedman’s exceptional ability to find and sound the emotion of every note and nuance of a song’s narrative that makes her such a show-stopping, heart-stopping, warm and wonderful performer.
Friedman tells her story early on in this fabulously enjoyable tribute show, which feels like an informal At Home With Maria
‘I’ve always had a soft spot for that little s**t in the gods,’ she twinkles. Stephen Sondheim just happened to be in the audience that night. ‘Who’s that girl?’ he asked, and promptly cast her as Dot in Sunday In The Park With George. The rest is musical-theatre history.
Friedman tells this story early on in this fabulously enjoyable tribute show, which feels like an informal At Home With Maria.
Having kicked off her sky-high heels, she introduces us to old friends with whom she has sung for decades and together they bring alive the best of Sondheim, Michel Legrand and Marvin Hamlisch who, in turn, became great personal friends until their deaths.
Just like Sondheim, she is determined to encourage the next generation of musical singers, welcoming on stage her 19-year-old son, Alfie (who has mastered one of Sondheim’s trickiest tongue-twisters from Merrily We Roll Along); as well as the choir from the Royal College of Music, all bursting with talent.
But Maria is the star, gloriously funny alongside Matthew White in A Little Priest from Sweeney Todd, desperately moving in both Sondheim’s Losing My Mind and a truly mind-blowing new arrangement (by her piano-accompanist Theo Jamieson) of Legrand’s The Windmills Of Your Mind. A magnificent legacy, generously shared.
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