Writer: Hugo Timbrell
Director Scott Le Crass
Teenage friendships, particularly between young gay men and their straight friends, are a fertile ground for queer writing. Hugo Timbrell’s My Life as a Cowboy focuses on Croydon-based 17-year-old Conor (Harry Evans), who decides to dance to Country and Western music in a local council-run talent show.
The notion that a talent show might bring an instant route out of a stultifying urban life does not feel especially new. However, Timbrell’s comedic script effectively mines the cliché by ensuring Conor is over-excited about a judge whose credentials rely solely on their tenuous relationship with a more famous person (the latter being Croydon native and X factor winner Leona Lewis).
But the competition itself is a hook on which to hang the fractious relationship that develops between Conor and his longtime best friend Zainab (Nusrath Tapadar), who he ropes in to accompany and choreograph him in the routine, especially as Conor befriends Callum Broome’s Michael, with whom he works as a lifeguard at the local leisure centre.
Where Evans is loose and expressive, Broome imbues Michael with a buttoned-down sense of repression imbued with a sense of unpredictability. As the character slowly reveals his songwriting ambitions, his attempts to open up to Conor harbour the play’s most comedic moments.
Indeed, for a play centred on a gay teenager’s attempt at self-expression, it is not a little disappointing that the script is more interested in his straight new friend, closely followed by his older friend. Tapadar brings depth to a character that feels much shallower on the page, the notion of a Muslim girl being best friends with an outré gay teen boy being dealt with so much better in material such as Everybody’s Talking About Jamie. Here, Zainab’s relationship with her faith and her family seems superficially written, as if Timbrell has as little interest in her character as Conor does.
Indeed, throughout the script tends to the paper thin. While Timbrell is capable of delivering intense laughs, mainly at the expense of Conor’s unseen mother, most of the time, the comedy feels half-hearted.
Director Scott Le Crass helps to keep up the actors’ energy throughout, which helps. But like Conor’s decision to junk the Shania Twain track he and Zainab were going to dance to in favour of Michael’s self-penned, Johnny Cash-inspired dirge, there are times when it feels like something faster-paced would be more appropriate.
The sense that, in wanting to use the competition to leave Croydon, Conor may also be trying to leave the part of his life that contains Zainab has the potential to be genuinely affecting, but there’s nothing especially powerful in the dialogue that ever really takes us into either character’s emotional journey.
And that’s My Life as a Cowboy’s biggest struggle throughout. As teenagers, the relatively low challenge of a mediocre talent show could seem truly life-changing. But from the outside looking in, what are considered high stakes by the characters just seem so much smaller. Instead of the big, bold expression promised by Shania Twain, it instead moves at the pace of Johnny Cash – and struggles to match the heart of either.
Continues until 8 September 2024
The Reviews Hub Score
Disappointing
