Where Ang Lee transformed Annie Proulx’s 35-page short story about two gay cowboys into a feature film in 2005, Ashley Robinson’s stage adaptation, all of 90 minutes long, returns it to a distilled purity.
The dialogue, especially at the start, is minimal, and skates on the surface of deeper felt emotions between Ennis (Lucas Hedges) and Jack (Mike Faist), the Wyoming sheepherders who meet, aged 19, and become furtive lovers for the next 20 years.
Nica Burns’s new theatre is proving itself as a space in which acoustics are central to the action and Dan Gillespie Sells’ country and western songs, led by Eddi Reader’s beautiful vocals, build the atmosphere and charge.
In Jonathan Butterell’s production, the music becomes its own language, even between the lovers who connect through song. Although there is a conspicuous yee-haa twang to it all, with Tom Pye’s set made of scrubland, tent and glowing campfire and his costumes featuring suede, spurs and Stetsons, it manages not to sink into cliche.
The story begins in 1963 in a state so homophobic it was life-threatening to be openly gay. Hedges and Faist take some time to warm up: they have the look of Abercrombie & Fitch models, topless in denims and suede boots, and the sexual interest is initially delivered in coy, cursory glances. The passion never really burns up the stage but their chemistry comes alive as boyish romance, with play fighting and suddenly grabbing ardour. It retains an innocence and tenderness all the way through, even in spite of the unspoken dissatisfaction they come to feel, and both actors are compelling, Faist especially so as the ebullient Jack, while Hedges is more melancholic as Ennis, too scared to risk a fuller life with Jack, and full of regret for it.
Staged as a memory play, it features an older Ennis (Paul Hickey), as grizzled as he is at the start of Proulx’s story. This is the play’s only dud note, the older figure is too evidently a device and spare part.
Then there is Ennis’s wife, Alma (Emily Fairn), who captures the impact of closeted male homosexuality on the women caught within its doubleness. “I’m not no queer,” says Ennis, Jack quickly echoing him, and we see how the denials are necessary for survival, in their time.
Yet still we cannot consign their story to the past at a moment in America in which the “don’t say gay” bill is gaining traction. The play’s ending is stark, leaving our sobs stuck, dry, in our throats. The men’s unlived lives, their unspent passions, are desolately evoked.
• At @sohoplace, London, until 12 August
