Everybody wants to be a cowboy. Squint-eyed and square-jawed, with a six-gun at their side, for little boys desperate to be tough guys, the walk on the wild side of outlaw life is the ultimate ambition. In a no-horse town in 1950s Wales, alas, Young Mos can make-believe as much as he likes, but no pardners are ever going to saddle up and form a posse. Except, when James Dean-alike Yank Gregg moseys into town along with a Hollywood film crew to make The Inn Of The Sixth Happiness, a whiff of acquired glamour leaves Mos and his widowed mother, Gwyneth, wide-eyed with hope. In much the same way as Snowdonia will never be the China it appears to be in the movie, things aren't as they appear.
In terms of how communities are raped, metaphorically or otherwise, by big business, Meic Povey's play for SgriptCymru accosts all the sentimental energies of Marie Jones's Stones In His Pockets, then takes the sharpest of diversions into a country more lyrically inclined, where the older Mos, now really walking alone, watches over his immediate past beside his mother's grave. What's left is a bitter-sweet elegy of magic and loss, where destiny is dictated by absence blown asunder by bullets that are far from blank.
Simon Harris's production is a sad little lament that verges on the unleavened dourness of a Presbyterian wake. Such serious representation of colonialism in the company's own back yard is noble in its stoicism, though waters are occasionally muddied by talented actors cast either too young or too old. Nevertheless, Sion Pritchard and Rhys Richards breach the divide of Mos as man and boy in a downbeat and mournful rites-of-passage set in a place no longer there.
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