14 October – 18 November

The opening scenes of Charlie Josephine’s play are comedy gold; with their men away prospecting for well over nine months the women of the town are taut to bursting with sexual frustration and a side helping of religious and cultural repression. Things boil over with the arrival of wanted desperado, Jack Cannon (Vinnie Heaven), on the run from the law and the bounty hunters, and at the same time searching for his brother’s killer.

If the play wanted a theme song it would be the Kinks’ Lola which sings of, ‘the crazy mixed up world’, that is in fact reality. Jack is the sweetest bandit you ever did see; in his red and white outfit with fringes, black and white boots, white ten-gallon hat and shiny six shooters, you could put him on top of the Christmas tree and he’d light up the room. Swaggering into the bar he causes the women to suffer a fit of the vapours. His arrival is like the ‘second coming’ when everybody can throw off their inhibitions and be whoever and whatever they want to be. ‘He’s and ‘she’s become ‘they’s, corsets are disgarded for loose colourful clothes – dresses, skirts or for Lucy (Lee Braithwaite) shirt and trousers – whilst the sheriff (Paul Hunter) a notorious lush, reveals his inner self as a cross-dresser with a liking for silk.

There is more than a hint of the influence of Aristophanes in this play, with the general absurdity, satire and release from the everyday. Again echoes of Lysistrata and the theme of strong women taking over a town to demand changes and the general moments of bacchanalia point back to Greek old comedy. There is a magical pregnancy after an irrepressibly horny, Miss Lillian (Sophie Melville) makes love in the bath with a willing Jack – the two by now in love, and new and previously unlikely relationships are formed in the town. That is until the men return at the end of act one.

The beginning of the second act forms a kind of parabasis, which had the dramatic effect of opening the oven door and allowing the nicely rising pudding to suddenly deflate. However, with the unnecessary lecture on diversity over, things pick up again with the arrival of Charley Parkhurst (LJ Parkinson) dressed in black with green hair, they were the meanest and most feared bounty hunter in the land. After much mayhem and a farcical gun fight involving a gang of outlaws hunting Jack, things settle down into a new order where there’s no ‘disrespecting’ folk and no ‘categorizing’. It seems the women didn’t want their men at all, they just wanted the freedom to express their sexuality and gender-identity in whatever way seemed to them natural.

With some songs (particularly from Mary [Bridgette Amofah]) and line dancing thrown in for good measure, with fine performances throughout and a great sense of an individual comic style, the play is a hoot and brought the audience to its feet at the finale.

★★★★☆   Graham Wyles    25 October 2023

Photography copyright @RSC Henri T