A stunning and hilarious exploration of modern masculinity from America’s rootin’est, tootin’est clown.
There are a lot of cowboys in comedy, but enough about stand-up promoters. As a symbol for performative white masculinity, the bean-consuming tough guy of the wild frontier is hard to beat.
Lil Wenker – her actual name – is a brilliant young performer from across the pond, and has been working exceptionally hard on this show alongside her director, Cecily Nash, with “a goal to create the perfectly stupid marriage of American and British clowning”.
They have succeeded.
Wenker emerges as Bangtail, the baddest man in Texas, with Groucho Marx-style eyebrows a truly fabulous and quite obviously fake moustache, fine six-shooters, and a cigar.
Everything about Bangtail screams manliness: the confidence, the strut, the poise, and the voice, absurdly gruff like stones in a dry gulch or the quiet echo of a canyon.
Wenker is one of those clowns who captures a room as soon as they enter – that mix of confidence, vulnerability, and preposterousness that the true artists possess.
Soon, through some participation with a rapt and willing (if occasionally confused) audience, a cast of characters emerges, populating this cowboy’s world: a horse. A cactus. A tumbleweed. Some saloon doors. A drunk woman. And, of course, a nemesis, for what is a man without an enemy?
Wenker and Nash could easily have wrung a full hour out of this set-up, so assured the performance and so universal the motif. But what elevates Bangtail is the second half, in which this strong, confident, and faintly mythical avatar for all that’s manly transforms into Alan, an accountant at a mid-sized animal feed manufacturer in rural Minnesota.
Alan is a different beast of man from Bangtail, mild-mannered and vulnerable, and some of the most moving clowning comes when Wenker’s modesty is protected merely by some tactically-placed stick-on moustaches and our hero faces an existential and economic crisis.
Combining the personal and the universal, this show is many things. It’s hyper masculinity through the lens of two women, scrutinised and pulled apart to absurdity, but also kind-hearted and generous to those caught within its expectations and contradictions.
It’s some silly, crowd-pleasing gun and saloon door noises, and a part that relies entirely on the gameness or otherwise of random members of a (in this case) somewhat inebriated circus tent near the sea.
But most of all, it’s a love-letter to a faraway parent, the Western-lovin’ white collar worker that gives this show its emotional heft and transcendental power.
you’re working 9-5 pushin’ spreadsheets,or wrangling livestock out there under the big skies of Texas and/or the Cambridgeshire fens, make sure you catch this show when the Bangtail wagon rolls into town.
Reviewed on 18th May
The Reviews Hub Score
Sublime Clowning
