Hostile review – surreal spaghetti western is a wild and wordless ride

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The lone ranger at the centre of Olivier Rannou’s family-friendly western initially appears as stranded and desolate as one of Samuel Beckett’s anti-heroes. Parched and prone across a table, with a knotted handkerchief on his head, he is marooned in a desert landscape with a water bottle full of sand, a desperate thirst and a scattering of human skeletal remains.

He retains an edge of existential angst, struggling to survive in extremis, but also becomes more clown-like by turns. Rannou shows us, through movement, expression and sound, that this cowboy is a wanted man, on the run, wrestling with the dangers of his barren, unpeopled surroundings.

There is the hallucinatory sound of dripping water, a fight with a rattlesnake and a saloon bar shootout, enacted solely by Rannou through mime and clowning, along with a delightful invention of props (the snake is conjured from string, the cacti from planks of wood).

Émilie Rougier’s electronic compositions accompany his antics, charging the atmosphere with danger and flipping the mood from light to dark. Sometimes, this sound resembles an electric didgeridoo; at other times, tinkly fairground tunes. There is also some lovely lighting design by Alan Floc’h and Alexandre Musset that evokes a relentlessly glaring desert sun or eerie night.

Hostile at the Churchill theatre, Edinburgh.

It is comic, cartoonish and brooding. The skeletons are clear memento mori but with comic edges, and there is exuberant silliness alongside this as well as a Beckettian sense of “failing better” that shows him stoically fending off the repeated, Road Runner-like mishaps that befall him.

Produced by French theatre company Bakélite, it is an eccentric and entertaining show. Rannou brings great, easy physicality, although some of it feels rather abstract and you wonder where this one-man spaghetti western is going or what it is ultimately saying.

A highlight comes with the visual playfulness of the set, also designed by Rannou. The original table morphs into other objects, ever bigger and more elaborate, including, at one point, a wooden horse which comes to life and slowly clops off the stage. It is all constructed, carpenter-like, by Rannou before our eyes, and it seems as if he is engaged in a delightful act of wood origami.

It absolutely amuses, but as a wordless show that does not try to explain itself, it is rather bemusing too.