Theatre Review: Misguided Mountain fails to move

The first thing to be said about Jonathan Butterell’s stage production of Brokeback Mountain is that there is no mountain. It’s at best suggested by Tom Pye’s set, where there are some stones and plants apparently growing wild on the floor and a makeshift stove. The big sex scene between the two cowboys who find love is also suggested in silhouette in a small tent rather than made manifest. 

This is a conscientious, well-acted, periodically powerful, but ultimately misguided rendering of Annie Proulx’s short story. It never, of course, had any real hope of emulating the big screen vistas of Ang Lee’s celebrated film or the charisma of Jake Gyllenhaal and the late Heath Ledger as the Wyoming sheepherders who enter into a doomed romance in an unenlightened time and place. 

Probably if I’d not seen the film – a bold and subversive reworking of the traditional cowboy film that must have had John Wayne turning in his grave – I’d have enjoyed this production a lot more.

Still, as the tragic star-cross’d cowboys, Lucas Hedges and Mike Faist do their jobs very well in all the circumstances. It’s all about furtive looks and words unspoken at the start, but there is an undoubted chemistry between the two men. Paul Hickey – as Hedges’ younger self –  haunts the stage like a spectre, an old man looking dolefully back on the great love affair of his life.

The sense of place and atmosphere so effortlessly conjured up in the film is left to Eddi Reader as a balladeer singing Dan Gillespie Sells’ songs to make up for, but, while she occasionally succeeds, she too often distracts from the acting.

Hedges happens to look uncannily like Prince Harry, but, oddly enough, that isn’t a distraction. It serves only to add to the sense of a man getting deep into a relationship that a lot of people can’t handle.