‘Brokeback Mountain’ Review: Well-Acted and Well-Meaning Play Version Doesn’t Make for Compelling Theater
19.05.2023 - 21:01
/ variety.com
David Benedict Canny casting of Mike Faist (“West Side Story”) and Lucas Hedges (“Manchester by the Sea”) and abundant efforts to honor Annie Proulx’s short story “Brokeback Mountain,” immortalized in Ang Lee’s screen version, are all in place. Above all, the sincerity underpinning director Jonathan Butterell’s premiere of a stage version is never in doubt. But despite a live soundtrack of bluegrass and country songs, the production only proves you can have too much fidelity. Sticking so doggedly to the original, the production fails to find anything approaching a satisfying theatrical form. Staged in-the-round in London’s 602-seat Soho Place theater, Ashley Robinson’s notably sparse adaptation of Proulx’s story confuses literary with literal. Borrowing the story’s introductory paragraphs, Robinson provides a cliched framing device, showing the older version of Ennis (Paul Hickey) waking up besieged by difficult memories. From his bedside radio, we hear the first of Dan Gillespie Sells’ original country songs welling up. The pedal steel guitar sets the scene, but its title and chorus “Don’t Let the Years Get You Down” is an immediately worrying indication that the production will be telling as well as showing.
That’s precisely what happens as everything proceeds with unvarying rhythm through the story’s staging posts, from the hiring of the two young men, tactiturn Ennis (Hedges) and talkative Jack (Faist), through the beginning and flowering of their secret relationship, to their marriages and the tragic conclusion. Theatricality is attempted in two ways. The live, accompanying soundtrack of 13 songs, soulfully sung not by the actors but by Scots singer Eddi Reader, is there to create the mood so vividly captured by
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