Looking Back, Looking Forward: Bad Day At Miss Lillian's
Kia ora koutou katoa and welcome back to Post-Electric, a newsletter about theatre and culture in the age of the profit-driven blackout. It’s the end of January and the start of February, which is a perfect time for a little round-up of the month of the shows I’ve seen and a little look forward to what’s coming up in the month of February in the city I currently live (LDN) and in a city that's almost on the exact other side of the world (WLG).
COWBOIS
@ Royal Court Theatre, London, 19/01
About two hours into Cowbois, Charlie Josephine’s new play about a Wild West town whose views on gender and sexuality get turned upside down, a cowboy like no other enters Miss Lillian’s saloon. Fashionable green mullet, dirty pencil moustache, this amazing Wild West-meets-Krusty Demons all-black ensemble, decked out in skulls and skeletons - Charley Parkhurst is a bad boy, dangerous and funny and sexy and cool. As played by LJ Parkinson, a drag king with a killer snarl, Charley is a shot in the arm, intimidating the men and showboating for the audience. You know that classic Western bit where the barkeep slings a drink down the bar, and the cowboy catches it? Charley does that, and it rules.
Parkinson’s performance is exhilarating. It reminds me of the feeling I had coming out of Josephine’s last play, I, Joan (Shakespeare’s Globe, London, 22/10/22), buzzing with energy from the athletic choreography and Isobel Thom’s fiery lead performance. I really wished the rest of Cowbois had left me that buzzed.
Instead, I came away frustrated by the flat blocking, actors all stood in lines, looking into the middle distance for huge chunks of time. I was pulled out of the action by the thudding explainer moments, where the characters step out of their skins to describe the flavour of bigotry we’ve just witnessed. I was exhausted by a play that likes the look of the Western but feels uninterested in what it can actually say through the genre’s myths, politics and general vibe.1
This is really embodied in Jack Cannon, the bandit who sweeps into town and unfucks everyone’s puritanical outlook on gender and what it can be. Time and again the play tells us that this is a guy who’s as skilled with the ladies as he is with a weapon, that he’s dangerous and sexy and cool, that he’s a real bad boy. But Jack is none of these things, either on the page or on the stage. As written, and as played by Vinnie Heaven, the best they’ve got is a flirty side-eye. Jack’s swooping dance moves are more interpretive than alluring; their whirlwind romance with Miss Lillian is one-sided, Heaven barely communicating the heat that’s supposedly between them. The play’s spending so much time trying to convince us Jack has a heart of gold that it’s forgotten what the gold is for.
That’s not to say Cowbois is a complete write-off: there’s some spectacular comedy performances here from Parkinson, Paul Hunter, Lee Braithwaite and Lucy McCormick, and there’s something interesting in the way it depicts today’s dominant strain of ‘apolitical’ liberalism as a cover for oppression and repression, because nothing is wrong and nobody’s scared if you never talk about the inequalities in the room. But there’s a fatal lack of charisma here: no sex, no thrill, no edge. The only surprise is One-Eyed Charley.
LAST RITES
@ Shoreditch Town Hall, London, 26/01
The most striking moments in Last Rites, Bristol theatre company Ad Infinitum’s collaboration with performer Ramesh Meyyappan, are when Meyyappan’s nameless character is washing the body of his recently-deceased father, a ritual his father has insisted that he perform. Meyyappan doesn’t perform the ritual in a tender or delicate way. His face is set in serious concentration, and he holds and cleans his father’s hands and feet firmly, with care but also with pressure and weight.
There’s grief in these movements, yes, but also shame, anger, love, hate, disbelief, all mixed together, difficult to bear without focus. The son struggles with the memory of the father he’s lost, a man he sought love from so many times, only to be refused again and again. A man who refused to answer his son’s questions about the gods; a man who refused to learn sign language so that they could talk; a man who stubbornly, viciously refused the idea that his traditions could not fit his son. Meyyappan shows us that struggle in the conflicting languages of father and son, shifting between the father’s rigid body language - shoulders hunched, glasses pushed up the nose, arms moving in fast, punctuated sweeps - and the son’s softer, fluid movements. It’s vivid, emotionally open, fantastic.
The music and visualised subtitles can feel like they’re serving up a sentimental version of this emotional arc, telegraphing what Meyyappan is already communicating through his face and body. But even if the show pushes too hard to make us really feel, Meyyappan doesn’t - his performance grows a sensitive and difficult portrait of a son who misses the father that he lost, long before the man died.
THE BEAUTIFUL FUTURE IS COMING
@ Jermyn Street Theatre, London, 02/02
Premiering at Jermyn Street as part of its festival of work by new theatremakers, Footprints, DONOTALIGHT’s eco-drama runs full-tilt at the history, present and future of the climate crisis. The triptych starts in 1854 with a version of Eunice Foote, the scientist who discovered the greenhouse effect of rising CO2 levels on the climate and went most of her life (and nearly a century of her death) barely recognised by the academy. Then the day-after-tomorrow, where an apathetic office worker falls in love with a boy who gets radicalised by a tragic extreme flooding event in London; and finally a remote seed bank at the turn of next century, where a pregnant scientist is trying to grow the wheat that will change it all.
The Beautiful Future is Coming is fleet and ambitious, skipping across the lives of these women at an increasing pace, tracking where the resonance in their lives despite the centuries between them: motherhood, misogyny, the difficulty of getting people (especially men) to understand The Shit That We Are In. There are echoes of The End We Start From, recently adapted by Mahalia Belo and Alice Birch into a spare, expressive film that I really liked. But where that story is rooted in city folk and village folk just trying to push through the looming ecological crisis, Wilson Brown is more interested in stories about the difficulty of communicating that crisis. These are stories about the urgency of the message, the hollowness when it falls on deaf ears, the faith required to create hope where none seems to exist. That all sings, loud and clear.
There’s a question here about why, in a play so preoccupied with science communication, we only really get vague gestures towards the science. You really feel it in Eunice’s story: while this is a version of Eunice Foote, not a facsimile, I still needed to look her up on Wikipedia afterwards to find out what she’d discovered. And there’s a struggle here between the performances - the grounded, serious work by Sabrina Wu, Martha Watson Allpress and Pepter Lunkuse, and the tornado-style comedy performance by George Fletcher, playing a different man in each timeline. Fletcher’s is extremely funny, and he is meant to be dominating - these stories are also about men who don’t listen, after all - but there’s no real release from his energy until the play’s final moments.
FEBRUARY
If you’re in London, two of my favourite shows from last year, Lucy McCormick’s Lucy & Friends and FlawBored’s It’s A Motherf**king Pleasure, are returning! Lucy & Friends will be at Soho Theatre from Tuesday 27th February to Thursday 16th March; It’s A Motherf**king Pleasure will be at the New Diorama Theatre from Tuesday 20th to Saturday 24th February.
I’ve already booked, accidentally, for two documentary theatre-ish shows playing this month. One is Ephemeral Ensemble’s Rewind, a multi-hyphenate performance piece about the disappearance and murder of human rights activists across Latin America, and the pursuit of justice; it’s playing at the New Diorama now, and running through Saturday 10th February. The other is A Family Business, Chris Thorpe’s next instalment in his ongoing investigation into the business and labour of nuclear disarmament; it’s playing at the Omnibus in Clapham on the weekend of Friday 23rd - Sunday 25th February. The Sunday evening performance is followed by Maddy Costa’s Theatre Club, a book club-style after-show space for conversation; I haven’t been to one since the national lockdowns finished, but I’ll be going to this one because they’re always incredibly good.
I’m also very excited about -
Metamorphosis, Lemn Sissay and Frantic Assembly’s adaptation of Franz Kafka’s novel about man transform big bug cant get out of bed family hate big bug sad story; that’s at Lyric Hammersmith until the Saturday 2nd March.
Shifters, the new romantic drama from Benedicte Lombe. I really really liked Lombe’s one-woman show Lava, about a woman who sets out on a journey of personal discovery after the British Passport Office asks why her first name isn’t on her South African passport. I also really really like romance on stage, I’m a big fuckin sop for it really. It’s at the Bush from Friday February 16th until the end of March.
Samuel Takes A Break …In Male Dungeon No. 5 After A Long But Generally Successful Day Of Tours, Rhianna Ilube’s genre-twisting story about a tour guide at a former Ghanian slave fortress who’s having a really bad day. Full disclosure: Rhianna was on my Masters programme; other full disclosure: I don’t think there’s anyone doing it quite like her at the moment, and I’m extremely excited about her professional debut, which goes up at the Yard Theatre from Friday February 9th through to Saturday March 9th.
If you’re in Wellington, it’s the goddamn NZ Fringe Festival, babey! My favourite time of year when I was in Wellington, and I miss it every day I’m away.
Making the frankly unreasonable assumption that they’re all going to tour, I’m hopeful that in the future I’ll be able to see new works from Trick of the Light (Suitcase Show, Gryphon Theatre, 27/02-02/03), Binge Culture (You & A.I., Te Auaha, 02-03/03 and 09-10/03), and House of Sand (Manage Your Expectations, Te Auaha, 27/02-03/03)
I feel confident recommending that you find time for Well Fare State’s Mesmerous (Awhi Yoga & Wellbeing, 16-18/02 and 23-25/02), Laura Gaudin and Izzi Lao’s CRUNCH (Meanwhile, 29/02-03/03) and Weirdo Productions’ JIMMY (05-07/03)
I’m really curious about these, from artists whose work I’ve not previously seen -
Temporary Show’s Dialogue Before Sunset (Wellington Museum, 24/02)
Kaysee Savali’s The Wave of the Woman (BATS Theatre, 05-09/03)
Max McAlpine’s Still Life (Meanwhile, 05-10/03)
That's all for this week! As always, I'm eager for this to be as much a conversation as anything else, so if you want to come back with agreement or criticism or a different perspective on Cowbois or Last Rites or The Beautiful Future is Coming, drop me a line! I'm pretty sure you can respond to the newsletter, but if not, come at me on Twitter at @adamgoodallyes or Twitch @daggettVEVO.
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I'll see you in two weeks round-about for my next issue, no idea what it'll be, we will see! Until then, thanks for reading! Keep safe, keep well, keep sinewy,
Adam
1 I really liked Oluwatayo Adewole’s piece in their newsletter, If I Speak…, ‘The Meh, The Bad and the Transmisogynistic’, about the play’s disinterest in transfemininity in the Wild West and its evasiveness in addressing the racism and colonialism embedded in the Western - do check it out.