Charlie Josephine’s Cowbois premiered last year at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-on-Avon. The Royal Shakespeare Theatre now brings this spoof Queer Western to London, hoping, no doubt, that it will appeal to the LGBTQ+ community and to trans audiences in particular.
Gender fluidity and masculine identity is its main subject. Charlie Josephine describes Cowbois as “a love letter to the trans masculine people in history whose stories have been ignored or erased.”
In a small town in the Wild West, the women are all on their own, except for a drunken sheriff. Their menfolk have been away for nearly a year, gold-rushing, when Jack Cannon, a notorious non-binary transmasc bandit, who is on the run from bounty hunters, drops by, bringing new ideas to the community and changing their lives and sexual identity for ever. The women start living as men and marrying women. The sheriff dresses up in women clothes.
Jack sings, jives and seduces the wife of the absent saloon owner. There is an over-extended bath-tub erotic sequence showing the couple in different positions, which is acted out with numerous black-outs. Jack is played by non-binary actor Vinnie Heaven, who is choregraphed to cowboi swagger in a highly stylised manner.
The production, co-directed by Charlie Josephine and Sean Holmes, is a mess and needs pruning. Cowbois is far too long and there is too much shouting and certainly too much silly shooting in the seemingly endless shoot-out finale. A drag performer hijacks the play whilst Vinnie Heaven, who is playing the leading character so well, is inexplicably left off-stage for far too much of the second act.
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