Brokeback Mountain  ★★★★
Soho Place. London 

Some great loves can be summed up in a short story. Some in a country ballad. With Brokeback Mountain, the world premiere of a reincarnation of the Annie Proulx tale, there is now a play that brings together both. Set within a cinematic accompaniment of song this poignantly sparse tale of repressed ranch hands, directed by Jonathan Butterell, manages to say everything that its stifled lovers cannot.

Ennis Del Mar’s parents died in a car crash when he was young. But before he died his father still managed to parade the corpse of a murdered gay man in front of Ennis (Lucas Hedges) as a cautionary tale. When rural working-class Ennis meets Jack Twist (Mike Faist) in the early 1960s he is emotionally and socially stunted. His vocabulary is one syllable up from a grunt. Ennis is already set to marry Alma (Emily Fairn) and fall into a pre-ordained life of family and children. Whilst working on a sheep farm at Brokeback Mountain Ennis encounters the hard-drinking, wild and garrulous Jack who is fresh from the rodeo. Jack lights a spark in Ennis. Passionate sex, and barely spoken love, lead to more than a decade of furtive annual get-togethers on pretend fishing trips. At the end of each tryst, they both return to their wives and children. Jack, though, is ready for more. He tells Ennis that he wants them to be together permanently, to create a facade of ranching partners, so that they can live a real life with each other.

The tale is told through the eyes of the lonely Older Ennis (Paul Hickey). He silently haunts the replaying of his memories. From the start the audience is clear that there will be no happy ending. Whilst this limits some possibilities it also adds an inevitability that mirrors the homophobic circumstances that entomb Ennis. 

Hedges and Faist have a robust and evocative embodiment of the lovers. Hedges shows Ennis to be tightly bound within his own body. Faist brings the energy and charm, and his passion berates their inability to achieve more together. It is performed on the @sohoplace’s intimate stage which has the remarkable ability to flow easily between sweaty bedrooms and a mountain top of snow, campfires, and birdsong.

To repeat, this is not a musical. It is a play set to music and song. A musical would have endangered the deliberately limited emotional vocabulary of the key characters. However, the deft country pop croonings from balladeer Eddi Reader serve both to deepen the moments and create counterpoints to them. It is more like the way music is used in a movie. A nod to Brokeback’s Mountains’ most famous incarnation in the cinema.

The inevitability of tragedy hangs over the entire play. However, with compelling central performances from Hedges, Faist and Fairn they bring immediacy when it’s needed. The end is known from the beginning but it is felt as it happens.

Review by ANDREW HEBDEN

Queerguru Contributing Editor ANDREW HEBDEN is a MEDIA & CULTURAL STUDIES graduate spending his career between London, Beijing, and NYC as an expert in media and social trends. As part of the expanding minimalist FIRE movement, he recently returned to the UK and lives in Soho. He devotes as much time as possible to the movies, theatre, and the gym. His favorite thing is to try something (anything) new every day