Cock review: love lies bleeding in Mike Bartlett’s bitter romantic triangle

How charged and potent words can be. And how they can mislead. The title of British playwright Mike Bartlett's 2009 play is principally a reference to the cockfights he saw in Mexico. But this bait-and-switch is merely the starting gun of a play about the slipperiness of language and labels: gay, straight, boyfriend, brother. Their elasticity is strained and snapped.

It's a tension that buzzes through this new production – the first time the play has been seen in the north of England. Joe Gill plays John, the only named character, who confesses to his boyfriend, M, at the start to cheating on him with a woman, W. The play rolls through the fallout, rewinds to John's first encounter with W, then culminates in them all meeting for a prickly dinner.

Cock – first staged in 2009 – dates from Bartlett's early career, before he turned to political subjects such as King Charles III and Donald Trump . But it was a time when sexual fluidity was less examined – and accepted – than today, and the drama hangs on an obligation to define your sexuality that feels a little dated.

Director Rupert Hill confidently controls the bombast of Bartlett's script, with its elaborate metaphors and narrated sex scene, so it lands less like engineered provocation. Gill's John, described as "fudge", droops and sags like a marionette awaiting a puppeteer. John O'Neill's M glowers, his frenzied agitation suggesting insecurity about John from the start. Hannah Ellis Ryan is poised and needle-like as the disruptor. If they overgesticulate, the effect is of characters grasping for fixed points and physical connection.

The volleying and jockeying plays out on a chalked rectangle resembling a sports court, audience on either side of the traverse stage. The characters hurl insults at each other like darts, often leaning forward and finishing with the jab of a finger. This is love and lust as blood sport.