Slim’s left his wife and kid for Cavale. She’s going to help him become a rock and roll god. It’s not obvious how.
First produced in 1971, Sam Shepard and Patti Smith’s Cowboy Mouth invites us into a world of dreams and desperation.
We’re somewhere in southwestern USA, in a room that’s seen better days (evocatively designed by Saz Watson.) The couple argue and make up, and argue and make up, and for a while this world seems distant, a vignette of reckless wretchedness. And then the script blossoms into beauty.
Cavale explains the need for a saviour. Not for the music industry, but for the human soul. The old religious forms no longer suffice, yet the spiritual hunger remains, deep and real. (What Australian play would say this? Has our country, insipid, sunburnt and stolen, seduced us into a pose of eyes firmly down? If so, why is it different in America?)
Saints can be found in all walks of life, Cavale says. It has to do with purity of purpose. Dylan might have been the saviour, as might Jagger, but no…. perhaps it’s Slim.
There’s a sprinkling of references to Yeats – the treading on of dreams, the beast slouching towards Bethlehem – and all this enriches a script that already bubbles hot with poetry, lava-like, frightening and fascinating.
And under Anna Houston’s direction, the cast bring it to the boil. Natassa Zoe and Austin Hayden as the couple are gloriously vibrant, but also achingly vulnerable. From their wonderfully raw physicality to their command of monologues both melancholic and mesmerising, the show is a thrilling 50 minutes of theatre.
And there’s a cameo from Watson, which the spoiler rule probably relegates to critical silence. But let me say this: it’s a very funny, very disturbing meditation on what it might actually be to be saved.
Paul Gilchrist
Cowboy Mouth by Sam Shepard and Patti Smith
at Flight Path Theatre until 30 March
Theatre Red 
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