Olivier Rannou's family-friendly western at the Edinburgh international festival starts with a lone cowboy as stranded and desolate as a Samuel Beckett anti-hero. Parched and prone across a table, a knotted handkerchief on his head, he is marooned in a desert with a water bottle full of sand, a desperate thirst, and scattered skeletal remains.
A clownish struggle for survival
He retains an existential edge, struggling to survive in extremis, but becomes more clown-like by turns. Through movement, expression, and sound, Rannou shows this cowboy is a wanted man on the run, wrestling with the dangers of his barren, unpeopled surroundings.
There is the hallucinatory sound of dripping water, a fight with a rattlesnake, and a saloon bar shootout, all enacted solely by Rannou through mime and clowning, with delightful props: the snake conjured from string, the cacti from planks of wood.
Sound and light design
Émilie Rougier's electronic compositions accompany his antics, charging the atmosphere with danger and flipping the mood from light to dark. Sometimes the sound resembles an electric didgeridoo; at other times, tinkly fairground tunes. Alan Floc'h and Alexandre Musset's lighting design evokes a relentlessly glaring desert sun or eerie night.
It is comic, cartoonish, and brooding. The skeletons are clear memento mori with comic edges, and there is exuberant silliness alongside a Beckettian sense of “failing better” as he stoically fends off Road Runner-like mishaps.
A visual treat
Produced by French theatre company Bakélite, it is an eccentric and entertaining show. Rannou brings great, easy physicality, though some of it feels abstract, leaving you wondering where this one-man spaghetti western is going or what it ultimately says.
A highlight is the visual playfulness of the set, also designed by Rannou. The original table morphs into ever bigger and more elaborate objects, including a wooden horse that comes to life and slowly clops off stage. It is all constructed, carpenter-like, before our eyes, like a delightful act of wood origami.
It absolutely amuses, but as a wordless show that does not explain itself, it is rather bemusing too. At Church Hill theatre, Edinburgh, until 11 August.
