"Bull". Pilch. Review by Victoria Tayler

 Bull is a funny play, which I mean in both senses. It’s out and out dark humour, and it’s finnicky, puzzling, delicate to balance. It shines a less than favourable light on the corporate world, reminding me all too well of the animalistic clamour of the University’s yearly law fair. And it’s Fight Club and American Psycho made British theatre, with a sharp light on classism and the airless world of feigned politeness. Riffing on the apparent dissimilarities, (actually similarities) between the allegedly civilized modern world and the violent prehistoric one, Bull depicts a world of money which is every bit as brutal and cutthroat as the imagined caveman past. 

Our ‘leading man’ Thomas (Aidan Kane) is no Patrick Bateman, conspicuously lacking in the slickness or charm one expects the corporate world to radiate. In his oversized suit, sporting stains, stumbling over the social torments of his coworkers and self-consciously rubbing his face, Thomas is evidently set up for failure. His coworkers, Isabel (Selma Lee) and Tony (Leo Bevan), are attractive, smarmy, and vicious.  It’s Tony who is our British Bateman, ‘a predator who runs marathons just to sleep with charity workers.’ There’s no similarly encapsulating quip to describe Isabel, but she’s got a sort of cruel, power-suit, girl boss feminist thing going on. When it comes down to the question of who will keep their jobs, and who will be made redundant, it’s the awkward Thomas who is the obvious victim. A foregone conclusion, we watch as Thomas is taunted into his predetermined downfall.

I enjoyed this show. The actors really showcased the peaks of Bartlett’s writing (about which I have mixed feelings) The humour is carried off well, even in the darkest of moments. Thomas blurts an insult to Isabel with the misguided choice of phrase, ‘you’re tight’ (presumably gesturing at the word ‘uptight’ but with unfortunate sexual connotations), with an impotent frustration so well-delivered it made me shudder. The ensuing chaos is mortifying and delicious. The put-your-face-to-my-abs scene (hard to explain) is as impossible to play as it sounds, but it’s the strongest moment of the performance. Isabel is deeply unsettling in the way she goes along with the torment, the visual of her smiling face at Tony’s side is particularly evil. Thomas is appropriately faltering and defensive, attempting to communicate disdain but landing on a kind of self-conscious terror. The audience’s laughter (loud, raucous) is invariably tinged with guilt, having played along with taunting our ill-suited anti-hero. Perhaps that’s why we laugh so hard at Tony’s self-righteous disbelief as Thomas refuses to go along with the ‘game’: what a prick!’ Thinking back now, it’s hard to recall how one is even led to the place of laughing that hard. The whole scene sings of great direction and a strong rehearsing game.

It is not Bevan’s only strong moment either, he plays the entire role with a subtle three-dimensional flair, drawing out the ambiguities in the ‘reality’ we’re watching. Is Tony really the lethally efficient character he projects, or his apparent life a charade, collectively constructed to engineer Thomas’ psychological decline? Whilst Bartlett only goes half the way with delivering on that theme, Bevan’s acting brings it to life: he picks up and drops characters, cycles through personas, engages an unreadable seriousness and plays fake sympathies, all book-ended by slow, sarcastic sips on his drink. He’s evil, he’s hilarious, he’s strangely enthralling. 

Yet I feel the ending falls on a note of blatant evil that didn’t live up to the gaslighting ambiguities I so loved in Bevan’s performance and in earlier scenes. It’s a combination of writing, direction and acting that lets it play out that way, and I think all that confusion stems from the text more than anything else. I’m not super familiar with Mike Bartlett’s repertoire of plays (quite the lengthy list), but having now watched Bull, and having read Cock, I do harbour the secret suspicion that Bartlett is better suited for a GCSE read through than a staged performance. This isn’t a criticism of the team’s choice to stage it (after all, it’s award-winning) but more an acknowledgement that the script is unwieldy, sometimes heavy-handed. 

Across the UK theatre scene, it seems there’s no real consensus on how to play Thomas, with different production companies sporting entirely different variations of character. Sometimes he’s a misogynistic incel, other times he fights back, succeeding in rescuing some small portion of his honour by winning the audience over with (often unintentional) humourous moments. Sometimes, he is neither: he simply lies down and gives up. Our production seems to have chosen that interpretation, and I don’t hate that choice. Revoking the possible nuance in Thomas being a misogynist (which admittedly, doesn’t seem to be very present in the actual text) makes this play into less of a whodunnit drama and more of a commentary about violence. The audience, held hostage to the bullying, is forced to reflect on the logical extremes of pretty privilege and the aggression we promote every time we chose to ascribe goodness to beauty and evil to ugliness. The production doesn’t run away from the bullying themes of the text by complicating them into non-existence: it vents them loud as clear. 

That interpretation means that the ending is obviously, self-consciously, evil. The Thomas of this production can’t fight, figuratively or literally. He flails about in ways which are agonising to watch. Isabel’s cruelty feels comically nasty, and as she lays out a bottle of liqueur for her unconscious victim, and steps over Thomas’ body to head off stage, the weight of what we have just watched is oppressive and stifling. It’s on the nose, but fair enough, I am not out to defend the corporate world from any damning indictments on it’s morality. And one does walk away wondering if they are the moral person they had thought they were, surely a valid response for theatre to provoke, even if it is a little Elizabethan.