Theatre review: Cowbois

Considering that attempting a trip to Stratford-upon-Avon amid rolling rail strikes is a bit of a coin-toss, I decided not to book for the RSC's Cowbois last year, fairly confident that we'd get a chance to see it transfer to London. Given the creative team I would have guessed the Globe, but instead the Royal Court gets Charlie Josephine's queer fantasy Western. Co-directed by Josephine and Sean Holmes, whose signature style of letting the actors use their own accents even in plays where you'd expect a very specific one means the Wild West is populated with voices from every corner of the UK and Ireland, the action takes place in a little town built on principles of acceptance and equality. Whether that's how it actually plays out when the men are around is a different story, but right now they're not: Most of the men left over a year ago to go prospecting for gold, and with no word from them and news of a cave-in, they're presumed dead.

Theatre review: Modest

Once again one of the highlights of going to the theatre as often as I do is finding out about people and events you'd think would be better known than they actually are, but have been largely forgotten - either because of an accident of history or, as is often the case and including Ellen Brammar's Modest, because of institutional inequalities. Here the central character is Elizabeth Thompson, a painter who narrowly missed out on becoming the first woman to be elected to the Royal Academy. What makes her such a particular outlier is that it would take another 42 years before the first woman (Annie Swynnerton, because I can Google stuff,) would actually join the institution. Paul Smith and Luke Skilbeck's production explores the gender conflicts in the story by putting Elizabeth (Emer Dineen) at the heart of an empowering drag show.