THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
This world premiere stage adaptation of Annie Proulx’s famous tale of two gay cowboys, which first appeared in The New Yorker in 1997, and was turned into an Oscar winning movie by Ang Lee in 2005, features the West End debuts of two hot American acting talents: Mike Faist who made a splash in West Side Story, and Lucas Hedges (Manchester by the Sea, Boy Erased).
Jonathan Butterell’s wonderfully poignant exploration of uncompleted lives and unspent passions confirms this story as the totemic work about love and masculinity which it is. It’s been a short story, a movie, an opera and now a play with music. Not a musical.
The big challenge for adapter Ashley Robinson was how to translate the interiority of the characters and not just stage the plot. Proulx used her deft and sparse prose to mine the unexpressed emotions of these two taciturn characters, while Ang Lee had the benefit of both great close ups and the beautiful Big Sky vistas of the Wyoming mountains to help him tell the story. He also was blessed with cinematic greats Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger.
Robinson has two solutions, first he uses a framing device of the older and now desolate Ennis (Paul Hickey) who haunts the stage, sometimes externalizing what young Ennis can’t express. This doesn’t avoid the obvious pitfall of rendering the emotion too manifest and telling the audience what to feel.
The other solution is more successful though, and it is to use music as a counterpoint. The great Scottish balladeer Eddi Reader (late of Fairground Attraction) and a top-class band are side stage performing a set of great new Blues/Country numbers by Dan Gillespie Sells (late of the band The Feeling). These perfectly accentuate the feeling and help evoke mood but, if anything, are too truncated. Tom Pye’s suitably spartan design for this in the round staging is perfectly bleak, aided by David Finn’s cold blue lighting to evoke those chilly mountains.
The other gamble here was to keep it to 90 minutes with no interval. This I generally applaud, as I often think if you can’t tell it in 90 (like they did in old Hollywood), it isn’t worth telling. However, here I wanted the 13 songs (10 of them live), played by major musicians like BJ Cole on pedal steel and Dave Miller on harmonica, to have more space to breathe.
The truncated length puts more pressure on the actors too, as they’re mostly having to relate the long arc of a romance in tightly fragmented scenes. The two triumph though, in delineating the very different lovers. Hedges gets Ennis’ laconic ordinariness spot-on and is all the more affecting therefore when he unburdens himself about the horrors of his homophobic father. That knocks the audience out of its romantic afterglow and reminds us that such bigotry hasn’t gone away. Ennis’ desire for a normality of course proves impossible. The more romantic Jack however thinks otherwise, but he’s a dreamer and a roué. The snake-hipped Faist is a revelation as this cocky, Texan, rodeo rider, a Romeo who totally upends Ennis’s life for good.
Emily Fairn provides sterling support as Ennis’s poor wife Alma, who takes the emotional brunt of her husband’s often selfish unhappiness, while also longing for him. She finally gets out to start a new life. And this play with music deserves a life far beyond the West End.
