International theatre director Dylan Trowbridge is known for creating bold, immersive work that pushes the boundaries of proximity between performer and audience. As a leading force behind Talk Is Free Theatre, his practice centres on stripping theatre back to its raw essentials to create experiences that are immediate and emotionally charged. His work seeks not just to tell stories, but to make audiences feel more vividly alive.
His latest production, Cock by Mike Bartlett, brings a radical new lens to the modern classic. Staged in an intimate, in-the-round setting, the play’s exploration of love, identity and desire unfolds with electrifying intensity, placing audiences at the centre of its emotional “combat.”
How do you reconcile intimacy with confrontation in your directorial approach?
The violence of the language, the danger of the space and the enormity of the love in cock are inseparable. When I read the play, I was gobsmacked by the rigour and bite of the dialogue, and the explosiveness of the arguments. Mike Barlett is a master of conflict. He uses tension and menace like Pinter and argument like Shaw. All in a lean, hilarious, razor-sharp 90 minutes.
But what makes all of this work is that Bartlett is writing about love at its most exposed, urgent and deep. That kind of love is rare, and it is volatile. It is a source of joy and agony. The more we care, the greater the cost, the greater the danger. This is why we have taken a play about relationships (where the action unfolds in coffee shops, parks, living rooms and bedrooms) and situated it in a dangerous space. A space designed for violence. An arena for human combat. Because love is magnificent and love can destroy you. So the “battlefield” aesthetic isn’t imposed on the play. It is a theatrical manifestation of the stakes, costs and dangers of love. Intimacy is the risk. It’s where people are most capable of hurting each other—and themselves.
The love in this play is beautiful, deep and worth the risk. It’s worth fighting for. And we are excited by the tension between the beauty of that love and the danger of the space.
I also love the challenge of taking dark work, cynical work, viscous dialogue, and mining it for hope, joy and love. For two reasons: One is that I feel it’s important as artists, whenever possible, to infuse positivity and beauty into the world. To make people feel alive, inspired and hopeful. The other is that when we play scenes with hope and fight for joy, it is profoundly devastating when things don’t work. People go to the theatre to feel something, and I believe this contrast optimises tension, emotional impact and catharsis.
Where do you locate theatricality in such a minimal framework? What becomes the primary engine of meaning for on stage?
Our production is radically minimalist. This approach, prompted by Bartlett, places full focus on the humanity of the characters, exposing their hopes and fears in a way that is raw and true. With everything stripped away, all that remains are bodies in space and language—and those are the primary engines of meaning in our production.
With nowhere to hide, every word, every breath, every movement, every silence carries enormous meaning. Words are weapons. Bartlett’s text demands verbal virtuosity, dexterous thinking, precision, wit and drive that goes far beyond most contemporary plays. Stripping everything away allows performers and audiences alike to intensify their focus on language, on argument.
We also express theatrical meaning through our use of space. Physical relationships between characters break into moments of abstraction — at times of intense intimacy, they engage from great distances; in moments of high conflict, they are as close as possible. This creates tension between the words that are being spoken and the physical language on stage. We also light the stage in a way that I’ve never seen done before.
Through every moment of this production, the cast and I have sought to maximise tension through language, argument, and use of space.
Are the audience complicit in the emotional “combat”?
Theatre has the capacity to be the art form with the most active and intimate relationship with its audience. As a director, I am inspired to experiment with proximity to intensify, deepen and activate the audiences’ experience. The audience for Cock is complicit. They’re not watching a play—they’re taking part in a ritual. The space puts them dangerously close, surrounding the action like spectators at an illicit fight club. They are the vessel for the drama, the container for the conflict—making up the four walls of whatever room the characters inhabit. They breathe the same air as the characters at their most exposed moments—witnessing euphoric joy and incapacitating heartbreak from inches away. Placed in such proximity, the audience invests more deeply. It is a more visceral and emotionally immersive way to experience the story. They witness all those gorgeous, nuanced non- verbal moments of truth, pain, and exposure that we can’t typically witness in traditional theatre spaces.
They may even feel an urge to intervene. One goal we have with this production is to make sure the audience never leaves feeling that they’ve watched a play. That is too passive an experience. I hope that they feel a deep personal charge from witnessing the raw humanity of these characters at such proximity.
And this tension—between witnessing and participating—is essential to the experience.
Did you feel tension between ambiguity and audience’s desire for clarity?
Language around gender and sexual identity has evolved rapidly since this play was written in 2009. There is a stronger understanding and acceptance of the concept that sexuality exists on a spectrum. John’s epiphany in the play—“gay, straight—what does it matter?….it’ about who the person is, what they do!” Clearly articulates a new and assured resistance to fixed identity labels. As does W’s simple line “I’m not a woman. I’m me.” The play boldly portrays a love so deep that it transcends sexuality, causing characters to reassess how bound they should be to any one specific identity.
In working on this play for two years and touring it internationally, my observation is that this concept resonates with our audiences. I don’t believe our audiences crave a conclusion wherein JOHN “makes a decision about what (he) is.”
Ultimately, even though this play grapples aggressively with fascinating questions about identity, John is just a person torn in half by all-consuming love for two people who happen to be different genders. That’s his dilemma. Not the corresponding identity labels.
There are adamant disagreements amongst our audiences about whether John should stay with M or be with W. But my instinct is that those divisions are about who the people are —not their genders.
Why return to Cock now—what feels urgent?
My mission with this production—and with all my work—is to create theatre that makes people feel more alive. I seek out plays that have the capacity to do this.
This mission was born of a profound and shocking loss I experienced 2 1/2 years ago—right around the time I was offered the opportunity to direct cock. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. All of my work is a response to this loss—I want to create theatre experiences that make people feel inspired, electrified and courageously alive.
Dark work, devastating work, can do this.
Everywhere, there are people going through the motions of being alive. Lost in their phones, living life on social media. Disconnected. Without passion, without purpose. At one point, a character in cock says, “This isn’t what I want. I just think this is easier.” That is the enemy we are fighting with this interpretation of Cock. The abject notion of being a passenger in one’s own life. That is why it feels urgent right now.
We only get to be alive one time. Great theatre should be a call to action. It should make people feel something; it should activate. This production of cock is a call to action to live life bravely, to seize joy, to seize love.
One of the many things I love about theatre in London is its robust revival culture. This play and its characters has been interpreted in recent memory by some of the great theatre artists in the world. James MacDonald, Ben Whishaw, Andrew Scott, Marianne Elliot, and Andrew Bailey. All idols of mine. I would love people who saw their productions to see ours. I believe they will experience the play in a completely different way.
Talk is Free theatre is an immersive, independent, international theatre company. We seek out work that is optimised by experimenting with the boundaries of proximity. That is why we are returning to this modern classic. We believe this immersive, experimental production optimises both the text and everything that makes theatre unique—liveness, immediacy, proximity. And we hope that experiencing this will make our audiences feel more vibrantly alive.