Go West! and you are immediately plunged into a fever dream of a post-apocalyptic frontier. A dry, pale-yellow cactus leans to one side, an oppressive orange light scorches the stage and a lone man sits, tapping his booted foot before dispatching a parched spit.
“Well don’t hurry back on my account” he complains to his newly arrived younger partner, before scornfully dismissing his news of a tall stranger in town, claiming that there is nothing this side of the coast except where they are going, a place to be marked on his valuable map. “Eyes to the horizon, boy!” is his mantra. He doesn’t share an interest in lost things be it dogs, defunct train timetables, journals or the ephemera of a bygone past.
The boy however memorises banal notices for lawnmowing, bake sales, babysitting, keeping a fading world alive while wanting there to be something else out there. Though barely literate he recites from Steinbeck, and anachronistically, an unused Nixon speech prepared in case the first moon landing failed.
Confronted with buying a house and leaving a mark, the young man prefers lived experience, a choice wryly mirrored in the Shaker furniture that has long outlasted its makers’ belief in the imminent end of the world.
The narrative unfolds in three loosely connected vignettes, linked more by mood than chronology. Maps mark imagined territories and paths in a world in which memory and fantasy constantly collide to look at we preserve, what we invent, and what we might still salvage when even mankind’s grandest frontiers teeter on the edge of collapse.
The play hints at Beckett in its loops, repeated lines, and focus on minimal objects, yet bursts with kinetic energy, visual flair, and comedy as they vividly inhabit memory, desire, and spirited invention. The moustachioed duo is playful and precise in timing and physicality which draws the audience into both humour and philosophical weight. Running shorter than its billing, the sun sets all too soon and this, its experimental nature and occasional narrative opacity might mean it’s not for everyone.
An absurdist, surreal and warmly human work for anyone who likes their theatre bold, funny, and sharply existential.
Show Times: 11 to 16 August 2025 at 8.25 pm.
Tickets: £11 (£9).
Suitability: 12+