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Hostile

Church Hill Theatre

Four stars

 So you think you’re a cowboy? Well, if you come along to the Church Hill Theatre over the next few days, you’ll find yourself in good company, pardner. The lone gunslinger at the heart of this fifty-minute solo family friendly show sure does. Without a word spoken, this strong but silent outlaw type on stage stakes his claim from the desert where he’s dying of thirst to a possible mirage of a one-horse town. The latter begins to look increasingly like a film set that can be knocked down and built into another world any second. 

 The loner manipulating all this is no man with no name, mind you, but is a French clowning auteur who goes by the handle of Olivier Rannou. Working with the Rennes based Bakélite company, Rannou takes the gritty swagger of spaghetti westerns and transforms it into an intricate and ingenious bite size display of object theatre.

 In terms of comic demeanour, there are shades here in Rannou’s mosey through the Wild West of Scottish artist Bud Neill’s strip cartoon cowboy Lobey Dosser at play. If it all feels like Rannou’s efforts as director and set designer as well as performer are over too soon, one imagines him galloping off into the sunset on his wooden steed to the next hand built town.

 If Émilie Rougier’s music is more John Carpenter than Ennio Morricone, it nevertheless makes for ideal action packed accompaniment to Rannou’s wordless approach. 

Rannou may be quick off the draw, but as a hail of bullets unleash sprays of the water he’s been craving for all along, he might just have met his high noon in a rootin’ tootin’ display performed with considerable charm. 

Until 11 Aug.

The Herald, August 9th 2026

 ends

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