Cowbois at the Royal Court, review: Urgent LGBTQ storytelling
Cowbois at the Royal Court review and star rating: ★★★★
It’s reassuring that the Royal Court continues to be a fertile ground for experimentation in an era where provocative plays are en vogue. They weren’t always: Sarah Kane’s Blasted premiered here in the 1990s, famously inciting rage from the Daily Mail’s Jack Tinker, who called the piece featuring the crunching of baby’s bones a “disgusting feast of filth!”
Lord knows what he’d think of Cowbois, but it’s part of an exciting new dawn for the Royal Court, who are presenting some brilliant queer work, not least Cowbois and last year’s Sound of the Underground, both meta-leaning works that challenge and deconstruct the idea of a traditional play, providing urgent LGBTQ representation for lesser-understood subsets of the community.
Charlie Josephine’s brilliantly entertaining play is taking the mickey from the start: it looks like we’re in the Wild West, but these cowboys have Irish, Welsh and northern English accents. They aren’t all cowboys either: some, including Vinnie Heaven’s Jack, are cowbois. It’s an inclusive, genderqueer term to refer to trans and non-binary gun slingers.
There is something mythical about Jack, who, often under spotlight, performs intricate, elaborate dances; expressions of gender that juxtapose with the hyper masculinity of their red and black cowboy suit. They aren’t just enigmatic for us, but for the women of the Wild West town, who are thirsty for intimacy after their husbands have left them to search for gold. There is some very saucy hanky panky between Jack and Sophie Melville’s Miss Lillian under Sean Holmes and Josephine’s direction, which, like the best sex, is funny as well as collar-looseningly hot.
That’s the extent of the plot: the women question their heteronormativity while they wait for their husbands to return, all the while realising they aren’t actually keen for their husbands to return at all. It leaves space for Josephine’s set of effervescent characters to pop from the stage. In act 2, LJ Parkinson’s Charley, a bounty hunter and one of a string of invaders bent on physically and mentally oppressing these women, is a metaphor for the oppression queer, and particularly trans and non-binary people, face disproportionately in real life.
Charley is a properly, darkly terrifying character, who echoes Heath Ledger’s Joker. They lollop about the stage in a creepy green suit looking properly deranged, but they manage to find farce in their arsenal too; a sort of reclaiming of the queer villainous trope. (Villains have long been portrayed as queer or camp, look at Blofield in James Bond as an obvious example.)
Act 2 loses pace at the top, focusing too strongly on a bland piece of plot about the straight men coming back (who wants them!) but broadly Josephine’s meta-leaning piece is an audacious hit. It’s part sketch comedy, part seriously impressive choreographed, high-octane blockbuster theatre. That it proves to be vital queer female, trans and non-binary representation? Even better.
Cowbois plays at the Royal Court theatre until 10 February and tickets are available here
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