Cock - Royal Court on Radio Three

Cock – Radio Three (Sunday 20^th November)

I don’t get out like I used to and visiting London theatres has long been off my agenda. Used to do them all. The National, The Barbican, old favourites The Royal Court and The Old Vic, and, if pushed, the populist West End when something really appealed. Nowadays I confine my theatre going to local haunts. Dunstable Rep and the others may not have the magnificent ghosts of George Devine and Lilian Bayliss to sustain them but they will do for me. And thank God they exist because elderly theatre lovers are ill served by the multi channels of the modern media. You can find hundreds of reality and celebrity shows but you will search in vain for anything remotely resembling real theatre on all those digital channels.

It wasn’t always the case. I have some old Play and Players magazines from the 1960’s and they used to list the plays on TV for each month. Everything from Shakespeare to Shaw, Galsworthy and Ibsen, and, for modern tastes, a bit of Pinter and Stoppard. Fifteen or more on only four channels. Even as late as the 1990’s we got the odd Ayckbourn or a Philip King or a J B Priestley. Anyone remember the wonderful ‘When We Are Married’ with the drunken photographer of Bill Fraser? Not anymore. All gone. We may have umpteen TV channels but you can’t find a real play on any of them. Is it therefore surprising that all the exhortations I get to sign up to Virgin or Sky go straight into the rubbish bin. Old folks, especially old theatre lovers, are both marginalised and ignored.

Thankfully radio hasn’t completely given up on us. Many are plays written for the medium, you get the odd gem at 2.15 in the afternoon on Radio Four, but every now and then an old fashioned theatre play turns up. Terence Rattigan’s centenary gave us a few on Saturday afternoons recently and, not so long ago, the same wavelength turned out a couple of Ayckbourns. It’s a long way from BBC2’s ‘Playhouse’ series which some time back, headed by a magnificent ‘A Doll’s House’, tantalisingly suggested that theatre in your home wasn’t dead, but it fed a dire need. But for those housebound folks still in need of the odd theatre fix the reliance, these days, is usually directed at Radio Three. And usually on Sunday night.

‘Art’, ‘Amy’s View’, ‘A Bequest to the Nation’, ‘The History Boys’, are just a few that I can remember. And last Sunday they gave us a real beauty. Royal Court production from the original cast of the English Stage Company. The play was called ‘Cock’ and the writer was Mike Bartlett. I knew little about either. I told you I don’t get out much these days. But for ninety minutes it absolutely gripped. Pure theatre and pure and beautifully incisive dialogue. A man tortured by his sexual identity plays off his gay lover against the woman he has recently had connections with. Literally. I do not know how they staged certain scenes on the stage but, on the radio, the pictures were graphically displayed. It was riveting. As it built to a dinner scene when both of the sexually confused man’s lovers thought he would betray the other I gasped at the suspense created. Ben Wishaw was superb as the tortured bisexual John and Andrew Scott and Katherine Parkinson spit out all their witty and acerbic lines with a precision and poetry which both heightened the tension and underlined the craft of Bartlett’s writing. I may have quibbled a bit at the introduction of a fourth character, the gay lover’s father, as on first hearing it added little to the tensions already created, but overall I say thank you.

Royal Court, English Stage Company, Radio Three? Knocks that Sky and Virgin lot into a cocked hat. But TV knows nothing about theatre. Their idea of drama is a bust up in the Queen Vic on Boxing Day or a penalty shoot out at Old Trafford. We disenfranchised oldies know different. ‘Cock’ was a bit of theatrical heaven in a home based media desert bestrewn with drivel. I am glad I caught it and sorry if you didn’t.

Roy Hall