Steamy cowboy encounter becomes a mountaintop yawnfest: LUKE JONES reviews Brokeback Mountain

Brokeback Mountain (Soho Place Theatre, London)

Verdict: A 90-minute snooze

Judgement:

Brace yourself for a lonely night on Brokeback Mountain. You remember the hit movie. Here we have a lively adaptation of the original short story. Not sure why.

Cowboys Jack and Ennis are as strong as pre-washed denim. Jack rambles on about rodeo; Ennis is a dejected old soul – Levi Strauss might have called him “troubled.”

The glitzy new Soho Place Theater, which has the soulless, empty sheen of a space-age conference center, has been roughed up to resemble the windswept wilderness of Wyoming. Our boys have to keep an eye on the sheep and wait out boredom and weather by falling in love and making mad, passionate love in a tent. We’ve all experienced it.

It’s a moving story, a great and important film, but a strange dead end; ten riveting minutes lost in a 90-minute snooze. First, you never quite buy the relationship between the two.

Mike Faist as Jack is a bouncy, charismatic whippet of a man. You immediately feel him warm and roll with his anger over their low-key romance.

Lucas Hedges’ Ennis is a quiet lad, but beyond that there’s not enough – nothing behind those pensive and pensive eyes.

So much so that there’s no point in him diving into the sack, having barely secured the tent pegs.

Where’s the sexual tension? Where’s the emotional foreplay? The cans? The stray touches? Nothing.

From aloof co-workers to a rattling romp in the time it takes to toast a marshmallow. Pick the wrong time to sneak a sip of your drink and you’ll miss it.

If they can meet, they don’t look comfortable in each other’s arms. I won’t be so rude as to say they look like store mannequins stacked in a back room, but it’s not far off.

Even the fights look choreographed: punch, two, three, four, slap, two, three, four.

This emptiness of chemistry then kills the plot, which is about them being forced apart by society. Ashley Robinson has done a fair bit of editing of the lyrics – cowboys are hardly Hamlets – but little of the unspoken is communicated. The exceptions that prove the rule are a spicy fight and a tragic twist that I won’t spoil.

Strangely enough, the latter is entirely due to the appearance of a band member (Sophie Reid) who provides a voice over a telephone line.

General view of the atmosphere at the world premiere of the stage adaptation of Annie Proulx’s ‘Brokeback Mountain’ at the Soho Place Theatre, London on May 18, 2023

A lot of emotional work is sublet to the band. This is a play with songs, not a musical as some had hoped.

I’m not sure a leggy chorus line would have helped things, though. Perched on a stool, former Fairground Attraction singer Eddi Reader gives us a good Tammy Wynette impression as she performs original songs by Dan Gillespie Sells.

A double bass is tenderly beaten and the most passionate lips of the night are clamped on a harmonica.

The night I went there was no line for the ladies room. The house was full of gay men of a certain age expecting something special.

But I saw yawns cause yawns, as mousetraps cause mousetraps. Adapting a beloved movie is not a safe bet.