Midlife Cowboy – Pleasance Theatre

Picture: Adam Trigg Photography

Midlife Cowboy continues at the Pleasance Theatre, London until 6 October 2019.

Star rating: two stars ★ ★ ✩ ✩✩

There is a point in Midlife Cowboy where Stuart, the titular lead and longtime head of the Swindon Country and Western Club, wonders if he hasn’t been a little selfish in his approach to the play he’s been writing for the club to perform at a local talent night.

One only wishes that Radio 4 stalwart Tony Hawks – who has written the book and music, directs, produces and stars in this muddle of a show – had taken the same advice to heart. Maybe with a little wider creative input, the decent stab at a story that lies buried within could emerge.

On stage, Hawks is joined by Debra Stephenson as his wife Jane, and Duncan Wisbey as rather clueless sidekick Graham. Both Stephenson and Wisbey have shown their ability for comedy and impressions in recent series of Radio 4’s Dead Ringers, but both seem out of their depth here when called upon to play normal characters.

It doesn’t help that none of the three principals are enormously strong singers, which does serve to hamper the best qualities of any musical. Stephenson tries her best with the several plaintive ballads she is called upon to sing, her best effort being a number which kicks Act II off in full maudlin mode. Wisbey, meanwhile, struggles when singing “straight”, but comes alive when called upon to perform one of Hawks’ comedy numbers.

Nor does it help that the book moments are so weak. Hawks may have a knack for avoiding repetition when he appears on Just a Minute, but he has no such qualms in a script that takes every simplistic plot point and repeats it multiple times to make sure the audience get it. Every character knows and understands their motivations, and tells everybody what they are, such that any possibility of nuance from the actors is extinguished before it has a chance to make an appearance.

One would hope, too, that promoting Midlife Cowboy as a comedy musical, coupled with Hawks’ comic writing history, would provide scope for a joke-filled script. Sadly that is far from the case – and when Hawks and Stephenson have to alert Wisbey’s all-too-literal Graham that what they have just said is a joke, we too are grateful for being told, for there is no other way to tell.

Glimmers of what Midlife Cowboy could have been come in the form of Georgina Field and James Thackeray, who join the club to bolster its numbers. The ukulele-playing Field, in particular, impresses with a charmingly silly number about the generic appeal of Swindon, and her off-kilter performance enlivens many a scene with little else to appeal.

Thackeray, meanwhile, while clearly the strongest singer and blessed with a charm that immediately warms one to troubled carpet-fitter Dan, is hampered by dialogue that cannot meet his abilities. Hawks doesn’t help matters by introducing a gay storyline which serves only to neutralise a threat to Stuart and Jane’s relationship, relegating one character’s sexuality in favour of the heterosexual couplings of his bandmates.

There are further issues with the script, not least in Act II, when after deciding that the club’s talent night performance should be a musical set rather than a one-act Western, the players continue to rehearse scenes. References to Jane’s sideline as a puppet-maker feel like they belong to a different draft where that would have relevance to literally anything else in the play, and the denouement is as awkwardly written, sappy and downright unbelievable as one would expect.

One does want to applaud the niche Hawks has found – country music is a genre ill served by most musicals, as are the struggles of middle-aged people trying to find their place in a world obsessed with youth. But Midlife Cowboy serves nobody very well, and we are all the poorer for that.

Scott Matthewman