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Charlie Josephine’s ‘Cowbois’ is less a play with a plot than a dazzling rapture on the subject of gender and sexual tolerance that for whatever reason happens to have taken the form of a spoof Western.
Co-directors Josephine and Sean Holmes have a lot of camp fun with the genre, and Josephine’s dialogue is entertainingly heavy on Wild West cliches.
But it intentionally never feels ‘real’: the cast members speak the dialogue in their own British and Irish accents, some very strange things happen with the rules of physics and biology, and it’s heaving with anachronisms, not least Grace Smart’s aggressively fabulous costumes. It leans into the fact that the Wild West of our imaginations is largely just that – an enduring fantasy based on a world that, at best, only existed briefly. Of course, the setting is intrinsic to ‘Cowbois’. But Josephine could have used a different, but similarly lurid setting – in space, or a pirate ship – and its fundamentals would be largely unaltered.
It’s not really about the Old West, but it’s definitely set there, specifically a small town whose men have all gone missing: they went prospecting for gold a year ago and never returned. Left behind to run things are their buttoned-up, repressed womenfolk and Roger (Paul Hunter), the drunken town sheriff.
As ‘Cowbois’ opens, the town has become a tedious place, with the main topic of conversation how saloon owner Miss Lillian (Sophie Melville) chooses to flavour her breakfast grits (like many things in the play this is a thinly veiled allegory for sexuality… but it’s also a boring conversation about breakfast).
Their lives are dull, with pining for their men and petitioning the church for a new preacher the only real activities on offer. But then, one day, their lives are shaken to the core by the arrival of Jack Cannon (Vinnie Heaven), a dandy outlaw with a devilish singing voice who the women swoon over while realising there’s something a little different about him.
To spell it out for readers at home, Jack - as played by nonbinary actor Heaven - is transmasculine. Kind of. One purpose of the period setting is that there are no labels here because the language didn’t exist: Jack simply shows the women (and man) of the town an alternative way of living their lives… one they pounce on with alacrity.
Josephine’s gaudy fantasia about a dusty old town awakened by Jack’s arrival and spurred on to new heights of fabulously dressed tolerance was all a bit whoop-whoop-you-go-girl for me, in places. Because the story is set in a time and place in which there is no meaningful understanding of trans issues or sexual fluidity, the rudimentary, open-hearted attempts to explain these things all come across as a bit ‘well-meaning CBeebies show’.
Still, it’s an awful lot of fun: not just its sunny open-heartedness and unassailable positivity, but because come the end it has pretty much just turned into a big silly game of cowboys, storytelling be damned. It’s hard not to be charmed. It looks amazing. There are songs. There is some classic Holmes visual stuff, notably a lengthy sex scene that includes no actual sex, just two clothed people taking a bath at tremendous length. It’s a hoot.
And it’s a good fit for the Court. It’s actually a transferring RSC production, dropped in at the last minute after the originally ‘Dana H’ had to cancel. But ‘Cowbois’ has galloped in to save the day in more ways than one – it chimes well with the inclusive themes of Featherstone’s recent programming, but is also just a lot more enjoyable than anything else to have run in the Court’s main house for months, if not years. With its decent-sized cast of heavyweight thesps – foremost the superb Melville, who sells every word, no matter how hokey – and a creative team outside of the Court’s usual circle, ‘Cowbois’ is a ray of sunshine and a blessed relief after a gruelling recent stretch of shows. Yee-haw!