Jerwood Upstairs: Cock

Mike Bartlett's perfectly titled four-hander is a forensic examination of the derailing of male desire. For his last, 'My Child', the Court's downstairs theatre was reconfigured as a claustrophobic tube carriage-come-coffee bar. Here, the audience are perched with equal discomfort around a kind of futuristic boxing ring set from Miriam Buether, in which James Macdonald delivers his suckerpunch of a production. John (a delightfully dithering Ben Whishaw) faces a most modern dilemma: he's queasily ensconced with his inexhaustibly bitchy boyfriend M (a superlative, mercurial Andrew Scott). Until, that is, he meets Katherine Parkinson's quietly wily W, who persuades him to dip his toe in hitherto untried hetero waters. Unable to subsequently choose between them, John invites both to the kind of impossibly contrived dinner party Noël Coward might have dreamed up. In the event, M's Father F farcically arrives, insisting that John remember he's a homosexual. But it's in trying to find himself through his wayward sexual desires that John becomes so infuriatingly lost.

With no recourse to props or costumes, events are never enacted. The sex, for instance, is very precisely iterated, and while the characters prowl round each other like cats in a cage, nobody exposes an inch of actual flesh. It's the clarity of these experiments in formal minimalism which signal Bartlett's brilliance, and it's difficult to convey just how much perfectly sculpted comedy he and Macdonald extract from this scenario. But however cruel, funny and elegant this dramatic haiku is, it's the scenario, hollow and hammy, that buckles badly under so much scrutiny. Though the play's intensity builds to pressure cooker pitch, none of its characters bear fleshed, human truths, and Bartlett falls short here of his own, exacting standards.