A sleepy US town in the late 19th century: the husbands are away, the wives are stewing, the sheriff is sloshed and there’s a bandit on the loose. Jack Cannon’s the name, and queering the wild west is his game. Strutting into the saloon looking like the lost third member of the White Stripes, Jack (played with panache by Vinnie Heaven) is a non-binary transmasc gunslinger who has the whole town agog with his snake-hipped jiving.
Cowbois, written by Charlie Josephine who co-directs with Sean Holmes, is a celebratory queer western with a dream cast. Gutsy newcomer Lee Braithwaite is electrifying as farmhand Lucy, who evolves into the headstrong Lou; Paul Hunter is goofy but moving as the bozo sheriff; Bridgette Amofah is tender as a widowed mother who hasn’t lost her pluck; and Emma Pallant and Lucy McCormick (a dead ringer for Katherine Parkinson in her skittish comic bluster) are a riot as the repressed wives flapping their fans with increasing zeal.
As befits a play that suffuses its late 19th-century setting with the language of our times, Grace Smart’s design and Simeon Miller’s lighting lend a disco pizzazz to the saloon. The high point is a revelatory love scene in which Jack and Miss Lillian (Sophie Melville) prove that consent really is sexy, their panted volleys of “Can I?” and “Yes!” escalating as their hands climb each other’s bodies.
After crystallising so much emotional intrigue, Jack is inexplicably sent packing for most of the second act, the stage ceded instead to the boorish husbands returning home to a world askew. How much more radical if Cowbois had omitted these straight males altogether, leaving space for something juicier than a mere shoot-out between Jack and his adversary Charley Parkhurst (played by LJ Parkinson, channelling the spirit of Divine in a Grotbags wig).
But for all that the second half veers between the chaotic and the needlessly on-the-nose (“Why you gotta be categorising how people love?”), it is still easy to feel about Cowbois the way Jack does about his night of passion with Lillian: “Somewhere in the world,” he sighs, “we just made something bloom.”
• At the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 18 November.
