Cowbois
Royal Court Theatre, London
The Wild West just got a little wilder. In Charlie Josephine’s mischievous spoof-Western Cowbois, it’s not tables that get upended in a sleepy gold-rush town saloon, but gender, identity and cultural expectations.
The scene is familiar to anyone who’s ever watched a Hollywood Western: wooden bar, glinting bottles, posters seeking a notorious bandit. Miss Lillian, tending the bar single-handed while her husband seeks his fortune, pokes disconsolately at a plate of breakfast. The men are away, the women are bored rigid, the sheriff drinks. Even the tumbleweed can’t be bothered to stop by.
As the play opens, the most exciting thing on offer is a heated debate as to whether grits should be eaten with salt or sugar. That Miss Lillian (the excellent Sophie Melville) eats them with neither already marks her out as a rebel. “How very queer,” remark Lucy McCormick’s Jayne and Emma Pallant’s Sally Ann, fanning themselves aggressively in an effort to stir something up, even if it’s only the sultry air.
Then in walks Jack Cannon, the wanted man — as it soon transpires — in every sense of the word. Jack’s eye-catching rodeo attire and sinuously gyrating hips are rather startling for someone on the run, and that’s not all that is striking. “Is man the right word?” wonder the women, as this remarkable outlaw (played with capricious charm and sharpshooter timing by Vinnie Heaven) begins to work some magic.
Soon Lucy Lou (Lee Braithwaite) has dumped the skirts and become plain Lou, the sheriff (Paul Hunter) has kicked the booze and slipped into silky skirts and Miss Lillian has fallen head-over-heels in love. Act one culminates in a riotous celebration of difference. Then the men return.
Josephine, who wrote I, Joan for Shakespeare’s Globe, brings the same zesty wit to this fantasia (an RSC production), which has great fun crashing macho Western stereotypes up against queer culture. Bar brawls, shoot-outs and showdowns rub shoulders with cabaret and highly stylised performance. It’s directed with tongue firmly in cheek by Josephine and Sean Holmes.
It’s both entertaining and purposeful, reminding us how myths such as the Hollywood version of the Wild West are coined, and then reframing them to include queer characters and a less binary world.
But after a while the show begins to unravel. Like many a stake-out, it goes on for far too long. The narrative drifts and sags, the style begins to feel laboured, and the lack of nuance becomes more problematic as the production stretches on into its third hour. There’s also a tendency to state what has already been shown through the action. It’s a show that handles important themes with wit, warmth and invention. But serious pruning would improve it considerably.
★★★☆☆
To February 10, royalcourttheatre.com
The Most Precious of Goods
Marylebone Theatre, London
For years, director Nicolas Kent has pushed at the boundaries of theatre in a particularly quiet way. While artistic director at the Tricycle (now Kiln) Theatre in north London, he programmed whole days dedicated to weighty topics, discussed through multiple very short plays. He also mounted a series of forensic political dramas that reproduced, verbatim, excerpts from major public inquiries. His two most recent productions painstakingly distilled sections of the Grenfell Tower inquiry. Quietly devastating, these were superb examples of theatre as vital public witness-bearing.
In a sense, The Most Precious of Goods is a successor to these: theatre as reflection and commemoration. Translated and dramatised by Kent from Jean-Claude Grumberg’s bestselling 2019 French novella, it combines the cosiness of a fireside story with the horrors of the Nazi death camps. Samantha Spiro (who took over when actor Allan Corduner fell ill) settles herself in an armchair, opens a book and begins with the familiar “Once upon a time . . . ”
What follows is a solo performance (with music) that entwines fairytale settings and characters — a poor woodcutter and his wife, a babe in the woods — with the grim details of transportation and mass murder. One day, the woodcutter’s wife, who yearns for a child, finds a small bundle thrown from one of the trains that speed through the forest and so is forever linked to the Jewish trainee surgeon and his family who are on that train, headed (though it is never named) to Auschwitz-Birkenau. She cares for the tiny infant, becoming a beacon of humanity amid unspeakable horrors.
The fairytale charm of the storytelling is in constant conflict with the material it handles, which somehow makes the facts freshly disturbing. Spiro, accompanied on stage by cellist Gemma Rosefield, who enriches the story with evocative snatches of melody, is a gripping storyteller. It’s a curious evening: not quite drama, not quite reading. But it’s quietly powerful and, in the final instance, about love.
★★★☆☆
To February 3, marylebonetheatre.com
Don’t Destroy Me
Arcola Theatre, London
The war has gone, for the characters in Michael Hastings’ Don’t Destroy Me, but its shadow lingers on. Informed by the writer’s own experience, this 1956 play focuses on a handful of residents in a south London lodging house. At the centre are Leo (Paul Rider) and Shani (Nathalie Barclay), a Jewish couple who fled Nazi Europe and whose relationship is cracking under the strain. He drinks; she finds solace with wide-boy neighbour George (Timothy O’Hara). On the landing upstairs live Mrs Pond (Alix Dunmore), suffering from PTSD, and her vulnerably needy 17-year-old daughter (Nell Williams).
They are all rattling along, unhappily but steadily, when Sammy, Leo’s estranged teenage son from his first marriage, comes to stay. He brings a record player and hope, but also baggage of his own as he questions his faith. Things come to a head when Shani invites the rabbi round and a stilted tea party erupts into full-blown hostility.
Staged by Two’s Company, it’s a drama that hums with authenticity and Tricia Thorns, directing, achieves a grainy evocation of bomb site-riddled, postwar London. Hastings (who wrote the hit play Tom & Viv) expresses sharply too the tension between generations traumatised by war, but in conflicting ways. Leo wants peace and quiet; his son wants jazz.
But it’s also very much the work of a young writer: rather clunkily constructed and awkward in its confrontation of ideas. The fractured style in part matches the damaged world that Hastings portrays, but, even so, it’s hard to pull off. The scenes involving Mrs Pond and her daughter in particular feel stilted and overburden a play already heavy with meaning. In the second half Sammy retreats into sullen anger — hard to play and hard to like.
That said, Eddie Boyce, in a professional stage debut as Sammy, invests the young character with vivid, hopeful vulnerability and brittle uncertainty. There are lovely performances too from Rider, as Leo, a man buckling under his experience, Nicholas Day as the bemused rabbi, and Sue Kelvin as a worldly-wise landlady.
★★★☆☆
To February 3. arcolatheatre.com
