Cock, review: Mike Bartlett’s sexuality-crisis drama still just about measures up

Some of the most heart-stopping moments in the Elton John biopic Rocketman, the stratospheric hit which made a Golden Globe-winning star of Welsh actor Taron Egerton (of Kingsman renown too), are those in which the troubled prodigy expresses sexual confusion and faces the prospect of personal and professional rejection for coming out as gay.

Terrific at conveying hurt, yearning and simmering self-doubt, Egerton now stars in Marianne Elliott’s revival of Mike Bartlett’s 2009 play Cock, a piece smartly and tragicomically about ongoing confusions of sexuality, the suffocating restrictions of categorisation and the agonies of the heart.

The puzzling thing is, though, that Egerton, who has trod the boards a few times before, isn’t taking the lead of John, a man who, having lived a gay life with a longstanding partner, suddenly falls for an interested woman and is torn between worlds, yet wonders why he has to choose.

The role of the protractedly, and perturbedly, unsure anti-hero in fact falls to Jonathan Bailey, who has become a face to watch in Bridgerton, eminently so in the imminent new season. Egerton has been cast instead as the unnamed M, the partner in question, and de facto rival to that unexpected siren, W (Jade Anouka, recently seen in His Dark Materials).

To some extent, Bailey’s centre-stage prominence makes sense. He got an Olivier award for his part in Elliott’s dazzling revival of Sondheim’s Company, delivering a sexuality-flipped rendition of the pre-marital panic-stations showstopper Getting Married Today. Openly gay, the actor is neatly assured at suggesting a confident, charismatic man about town whose ease in his own skin succumbs to prickly disquiet.

Even so, though, I can’t help wishing that Egerton had been entrusted with the part, at least perhaps in alternating performances. At the original Royal Court production, Ben Whishaw had a gawky vulnerability that gave John’s enervating self-preoccupation a saving endearing side. The buoyant Bailey doesn’t fully have that. Although straight, Egerton eludes simple pigeonholing; blessed with a blank, boyish ambivalence, he offsets his robust physicality with a fragile delicacy in his glances.

It doesn’t feel like he’s being particularly stretched here. And while Bailey earns his spurs, some overstated between-scenes movement – complete with Munch-style silent screams – does the superficial heavy lifting where a palpable emotional desolation should be. Mind you, the pair look fully rounded compared to Anouka, saddled, in the case of W, with such feminine forbearance that she’s part cipher, part saint, while Phil Daniels crops up to only partial avail as M’s same-sex-tolerant dad, F.

Presented against a curved back wall of burnished metal with fluorescent-effect rods dangling from on high, the production projects modish style without attaining the searing intensity of the original cockpit staging. And while the script has broadly kept pace with the times, liberalism’s leaps and bounds have lent a sepia tinge to its focus on bisexuality, even if it still strikes a valid blow for unconstrained self-definition. (NB: everyone remains clothed and sex is teasingly implied.)

All in all, it still measures up, but the super-talented Bartlett – the original magic Mike perhaps – went on to bigger and better things and is girding his loins for two premieres in the coming weeks.

Until June 4. Tickets: 0333 009 6690; cocktheplay.co.uk