Last year, in I, Joan, at London’s Globe theatre, writer Charlie Josephine cast back in history to consider the gender of France’s 15th-century patron saint. In Cowbois, Josephine presents a pastiche of Hollywood’s 19th-century wild west. A stranger arrives in an isolated town and acts as an agent of change, challenging people’s notions of gender and sexual identity.
The setting is classic: an old-fashioned saloon; a wooden bar backed by a mirror; lines of bottles of hard liquor; animal heads looking down from gallery railings (Grace Smart’s spot-on design). Jack (Vinnie Heaven) is an outlaw, looking for a place to hide and rest. Convention-bound, sex-starved townsfolk come over all of a flutter (their other halves joined a gold rush a year earlier and nothing has been heard of them since). Jack is: “kind of fine”; “handsome as hell”; “Are you blushing?” “No!”; “Is man the right… none of the words quite… I’ve never met anyone like Jack.” Love blossoms – and then the gold-seekers return, empty-handed.
Familiar tropes are lined up like shot glasses to be downed and discarded: the innocent kid whose unconcerned acceptance of difference opens the eyes of adults (on press night played cute-as-a-button by Alastair Ngwenya); a love scene in a bathtub (protracted and, from splashing sounds, pretty physical – I couldn’t see through a head between me and the stage) followed by a miraculous pregnancy; and a climactic shootout during which characters have meaningful exchanges while gunning down black-clad baddies (supreme among these, LJ Parkinson’s presence-charged Charley).
It should be fun – and if it were half the length, it could be. Slow, script-indulgent direction from Josephine and Sean Holmes highlights superficialities of characterisation and blunts potential ironies. By contrast, atmospherics are satisfyingly realised by Mwen’s sound design and Jim Fortune’s music, with great singing from cast members backed by a toe-tapping live band.
