Cowbois

Yee/Yer/Yey Hah

Cowbois

by Charlie Josephine

Royal Shakespeare Company, at the Jerwood Downstairs, Royal Court Theatre until 10^th February

Review by Gill Martin

Come out with your guns blazing, your Stetson at a jaunty angle and your spurs sparkling for a night on the town with the wildest Western.  Cowbois is tagged as a rollicking queer Western like you’ve never seen before.  They ain’t wrong.

Audiences at the Royal Court are treated to a rare rootin’ tootin’ night of lively music, livelier dance, the steamiest of erotic sex scenes, and furious gun fights overlaid with serious messages of gender inclusivity.

This joyous queer cowboy romp, co-directed by Charlie Josephine and Sean Holmes and nominated for two What Onstage Awards for Best New Play and Best Costume Design, opens in a sleepy town in the Victorian Wild West, where the womenfolk drift through their days like tumbleweed, fanning their pale faces, eating grits and praying for the safe return of husbands swept up in the Gold Rush.

The macho men have been missing for almost a year and show no sign of returning to the isolated town they built.  Their women has assumed masculine roles to survive.  One (shock horror) even shoots a lame horse.

The pastor is absent.

The only guy in this god-forsaken one-saloon-bar-town is the alcoholic sheriff with his penchant for whiskey and wearing silk. 

The only guy, that is, until handsome bandit Jack Cannon swaggers into the town’s saloon where house rules decree: No Guns, No Politics.  He is seeking a place to hide from the bounty hunters on his tail.  His brooding good looks stare down from the bar in a Wanted poster offering a fat reward.

Now we can brace for romance, bromance, sexual politics served with riotous humour among the gun-slingers, repressed rustling of petticoats and heaving bodices.

We meet a fabulously talented cast of men, women, trans and boy – all with their authentic regional accents, plus a splendid quartet of musicians pumping out banjo, harmonica, guitar, keyboard and bass for thigh-slapping, foot-tapping, hip-swivelling moves.  As well as some Cool Hand Luke tricks with guns.  Yes, it’s mighty noisy out there as the body count mounts in the swirling gun smoke.

Cast lists these days carry the obligatory they/them parentheses.  Suffice it to say, the bandit dude Jack in scarlet and white leather is played by Vinnie Heaven, all smouldering dark eyes and attitude.  His love-lust interest, who could pass as a latter day Bonnie and Clyde star Faye Dunaway (Sophie Melville, who plays saloon landlady Miss Lillian) works them both into a lather of longing in a memorable bath scene, even more sexy for keeping their clothes on.   Well, most of them.

Cast costumes morph into a gaudy confection of vibrant outfits all the better to line dance in.

One-eyed Charlie Parkhurst (LJ Parkinson) dazzles in hi-vis green wig and jet-black suit adorned with skull and bones.  Only the sloshed Sheriff, with the unforgettable line, ‘Don’t your skin fancy a bit of silk sometimes?’ wears virginal white.   Silk, of course, with an abundance of glitter.

He’s a better guardian of the law when weaned off the hooch, and the town settles until the Gold Rush men return, sowing sexism, racism and general discord against ‘primitive’ Apaches, homosexual and Europeans.  ‘No need for the ladies to be worried about world things.   Let the men worry about that,’ opines Miss Lillian’s abusive husband.

The Wild West World turns on its axis when bounty hunters threaten and the women take up weapons to fight for a love worth dying for.  No truer word is spoken with this line: ‘After all the shit women have to put up with I’m surprised they don’t ALL shoot.’

Gill Martin, January 2024

Photography by HenriT © RSC