Review: A ‘Brokeback Mountain’ Lacking Some Intensity

“This ain’t no little thing,” Jack Twist (Mike Faist) says of the depth of attraction he’s experiencing in “Brokeback Mountain.”

But the rodeo cowboy might equally be referring to the continued lifetime of Annie Proulx’s celebrated quick story. First seen on the pages of The New Yorker in 1997, Proulx’s distilled account of a tragically foreshortened affair has been an Oscar-winning movie, an opera and now a self-described play-with-music.

This newest iteration opened Thursday night time within the @sohoplace theater within the West End, the place it’s scheduled to run by means of Aug. 12, providing a passing glimpse of some powerfully acquainted characters. The naked bones of the narrative are there; the dramatically obligatory flesh and blood and sinew are usually not.

I used to be happy to resume my acquaintanceship with the gregarious Jack and the extra indrawn, troubled Ennis del Mar (Lucas Hedges), the 2 males who start a furtive relationship in 1963 whereas herding sheep within the rural Wyoming locale of the title.

But I’m undecided that the American author Ashley Robinson’s adaptation really deepens our understanding of fabric that many will inevitably affiliate with Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger in a lauded film that lasts a very good 45 minutes longer than the play (Jonathan Butterell’s atmospheric manufacturing clocks in at 90 minutes, no intermission).

Told piecemeal throughout 20 years, the play comes punctuated with a pretty sequence of authentic songs by Dan Gillespie Sells, the English musician with whom Butterell collaborated on the (very candy) homegrown stage and display musical, “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie.”

The seductive nation twang of his music is punchily delivered right here by the Scottish singer-songwriter Eddi Reader and an ace band seen together with the stage: look intently and also you’ll see the pedal metal guitarist B.J. Cole, who has labored with Elton John and Joan Armatrading, amongst others.

The music exists to specific feelings to which the lads, and the ladies they marry, are reluctant to offer voice outright. Reader, billed because the Balladeer, is granted an articulacy lacking from the characters close by onstage who reside of their our bodies and never their minds.

A standout quantity, “Sharing Your Heart,” comes on the level at which Ennis’s spouse, Alma (a sympathetic Emily Fairn), realizes that her husband’s lasting affections lie elsewhere. In a separate monitor, lyrics describe “the lavender sky,” which a movie can simply depict however which right here must be taken on religion. Tom Pye’s evocative set retains nearer to the bottom, bringing to life kitchens, campfires and the tent inside which Ennis and Jack first permit themselves to be intimate.

The two search shelter from the chilly solely to seek out additional consolation in one another’s arms, and the tent shakes on cue to sign the carnal exercise occurring inside it. What we don’t get, past stolen kisses, is the layered unfolding of a relationship with an depth that takes the pair unexpectedly, so movingly evoked in each the unique story and the movie.

It’s one factor for Jack to look on, clearly intrigued, close to the beginning of the play as Ennis washes himself. But the writing is just too synoptic and the motion too abbreviated to permit the complete weight of what’s occurring between them to be felt.

“I ain’t no queer,” Ennis says early on, wanting to disavow the sentiments that can come to eat his life. What’s lacking is time correctly spent within the pair’s firm, in order that we really feel the ebb and stream of this inconceivable romance. As it’s, we get a sequence of highlights, a seeming annotation of the play moderately than the factor itself, with the advancing years indicated by the ages of Ennis’s two daughters and Jack’s son. Mentions of the Vietnam War and the draft provide a perfunctory nod to the broader world past.

Onscreen, after all, you’ll be able to age up the actors on the way in which to the story’s bleak conclusion. The innovation right here is to recast the story as a reminiscence play, with the Older Ennis (a grieving Paul Hickey) available all through to indicate the continued influence of Jack upon Ennis. The impact, not less than for me, was to solid a look again to Sam Shepard’s “Fool For Love,” one other play a couple of flamable relationship outlined by a personality named solely as The Old Man.

The two leads, of their West End debuts, acquit themselves nicely given the formidable problem posed by their display forbears. Hedges might not have the fast bodily command that Ledger had onscreen, however he shares his late predecessor’s furrowed forehead and a way of roiling anguish at society’s intolerance, and to a point his personal. This is somebody who won’t ever know peace.

And Faist, so memorably springy and important as Riff within the Steven Spielberg remake of “West Side Story,” is actually great: partaking and likable from the beginning, solely to succeed in a psychic abyss on the way in which to Jack’s signature remark to Ennis: “I wish I knew how to quit you.” Pausing to play a imply harmonica, Faist greater than justifies a play that may in any other case really feel a tad superfluous.

You might or might not weep at this “Brokeback” — I didn’t — however simply as Jack is to Ennis, I count on Faist’s efficiency can be inconceivable to overlook.

Brokeback Mountain

Through Aug. 12 at @sohoplace in London; sohoplace.org