COCK By Mike Bartlett
WELCOME
We’re also delighted that Kate Hewitt is making her directorial debut in Chichester with this production. Winner of the JMK Young Director Award and the inaugural RTST Director Award 2016, she was named as one of Variety’s ‘10 Brits to Watch in 2017’.
Welcome to Cock, the first major revival of Mike Bartlett’s provocative, funny and searing exploration of the complexity of contemporary relationships.
DANIEL EVANS AND RACHEL TACKLEY PHOTOGRAPH BY TOBIAS KEY
When it premiered at the Royal Court (and then off-Broadway) in 2009, it won an Olivier Award; and Mike has since talked of his amazement at ‘the investment people had in the play watching it. It’s everything a writer could want - that you connect and people take the play out with them, and think about it in their lives.’ ‘Thinking about it in their lives’ is exactly what we hope our audiences will experience from all the plays you see here, whether classic or modern. As one of our most exciting contemporary writers for stage and screen - from King Charles III to Doctor Foster and Press - we are thrilled to be adding Mike to the roster of illustrious dramatists whose plays we’re presenting in the Minerva this season.
The cast comprises three of our brightest younger actors - Isabella Laughland, Matthew Needham and Luke Thallon. They are joined by Simon Chandler, making a welcome return to the Minerva after 2017’s The Stepmother. There’s a great chance to hear from Mike Bartlett in depth when he’s in Late Night conversation with Kate Mosse after the performance on 16 October; while on 27 October, Professor Simon Barker from the University of Chichester will lead a panel discussion on contemporary representation of gender and sexuality on stage. We hope you can join us for those events, and that you enjoy this performance.
Artistic Director Daniel Evans
cft.org.uk
Executive Director Rachel Tackley
COMING SOON
THE MIDNIGHT GANG By David Walliams Adapted by Bryony Lavery Music & Lyrics by Joe Stilgoe This inventive tale of fun, friendship and kindness is directed by Dale Rooks (Running Wild). Jennie Dale returns to play Matron following her acclaimed performance as Parchester in Me and My Girl.
WORLD PREMIERE 13 October – 3 November #TheMidnightGang
cft.org.uk
TH E CAFÉ & THE FOYLE TERRACE The Café in the Festival Theatre is open daily from 10am serving freshly made sandwiches, soup, cakes and pastries. Enjoy our barista coffee or choose from a range of hot and cold drinks including wines and beers. The Café is light and airy and offers al fresco seating and free Wi-Fi. The Bar and The Foyle Terrace in the Festival Theatre are open 90 minutes before the show and both serve a selection of locally produced spirits, beers, lagers and wine by the glass or the bottle. The Foyle Terrace also serves pizzas, quiches, jacket potatoes and salads before the show.
The Brasserie in the Minerva Theatre is open for pre-show dining in new stylish and elegant surroundings. The restaurant serves a contemporary British menu using local and seasonal ingredients as well as an excellent choice of wines. Open 12.30pm - 2.30pm on matinee days and from 5.30pm for evening performances.
Enjoy either a main meal or one of our lighter food options before or after the show in the Minerva Bar & Grill upstairs, which offers a more relaxed atmosphere. Open 90 minutes before matinee performances, from 5pm for evening performances, during the interval and post-show.
RESERVATIONS
To reserve a table in the Brasserie or Minerva Bar & Grill visit cft.org.uk/dining for online reservations. Alternatively please call 01243 782219 or email dining@cft.org.uk
COCK By Mike Bartlett
THE GAMES PEOPLE PLAY Suppose someone said, “Shall we play a game?”: would that sound (a) fun or (b) threatening? Does it even have to be one or the other? Could it be, say, tempting too? Mike Bartlett’s Olivier Award-winning domestic drama Cock startlingly combines the entertaining, the frisky and the verbally lacerating, centering on a character named John who can’t decide between two lovers: one male, one female. And it is very much ‘game on’, as Bartlett himself remarks, mulling on CFT’s new production and what inspired him to write Cock in the late Noughties, when he was just 29. “I was on an international playwrights’ exchange organised by the Royal Court Theatre,” he recollects. “I was staying in the ‘Zona Rosa’ as they call it – the gay district in Mexico City – and I got really fascinated by the fact that they still do bullfighting in Mexico and, albeit illegally, cockfighting. I saw someone showing the cock around the community before a fight, and I went to see a bullfight. I became fascinated by the different energy of blood sports and by our attendance at these rituals, in these ritualistic environments where it is the simplest thing – people gathered round a space where something happens. So,” he explains, “the play was written in that moment, in this burst of energy. I just started writing the dialogue of the first scene, and the form emerged with the metaphor of the cockfight and bullfight clearly in my mind, and the feeling that it should be like the bouts of a fight, totally stripped of anything unnecessary.” In his script there are no traditional scene headings, only a thin line drawn across the page between the said bouts. The opening stage direction succinctly jettisons the clutter of conventional naturalistic scenery – “no props, no furniture” – and it stipulates the MIKE BARTLETT
dialogue should be accompanied by “no mime”. Thus, for instance, when a dinner-party guest says, “Pass the wine”, the performers don’t enact those words. Bartlett, thereby, goes markedly beyond Hamlet’s famous, gesticulation-moderating Advice to the Players: “Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand... suit the action to the word, the word to the action.” Cock’s radically minimalistic specifications are, Bartlett says, “sort of deliberately provocative on my part.”
‘It’s hard to be sure where the line lies between truth, deception and self-deception’ With ready good humour, he recognises that it may sound as if the play is esoterically avant-garde (as well as inducing box-office blushes in some, due to its four-letter title). However, this is a dramatist who also knows his classics, having becoming intrigued by acting at Abingdon School, near his hometown of Oxford, and having gone on to study English and Theatre at the University of Leeds. His list of acknowledged literary ‘influences’ ranges from Shakespeare, Chekhov and Brecht to Pinter, Caryl Churchill, debbie tucker green and Tony Kushner, although he underlines that imitating is never part of his creative impulse. “I don’t think, ‘I’ll do my version of that’” he says, “I mostly think, ‘There’s no way on earth I could ever write anything like that. I should just stop trying’.” In any case, with Cock, it is not a matter of being categorically avant-garde