Theatre reviews: Calamity Jane | Jocasta

Nikolai Foster’s touring production of Calamity Jane exposes the dark underbelly of America’s pioneering past with a breezy style, writes Joyce McMillan

Carrie Hope Fletcher’s star turn as Calamity Jane packs the theatre to the rafters (Picture: Mark Senior)

Calamity Jane, Festival Theatre, Edinburgh ★★★★

Jocasta, Oran Mor, Glasgow ★★★

At a moment when the face America presents to the world is changing at frightening speed, those anxious for insight into what the heck is going on could do worse than cut along to the Festival Theatre in Edinburgh, currently playing host to Nikolai Foster’s sparkling touring production of Calamity Jane.

Zoë Hunter delivers a powerful and moving performance in Jocasta (Picture: Tommy Ga-Ken Wan)

The musical is based on David Butler’s 1953 film starring Doris Day, itself inspired by the real-life story of Calamity Jane Hickok, a legendary female sharp-shooter who, back between 1870 and 1900, also made a living as a stagecoach driver, gold prospector, and professional gambler, based in Deadwood, South Dakota.

The 1953 film is a notoriously strange and sugary version of her story, in which – after a gender-bending disaster at the Deadwood's vaudeville theatre, when an advertised actress turns out to be a man – Calamity sets off for Chicago to bring back a real female star, and ends up, by mistake, returning with the star’s maid and dresser Katie Brown. And what is particularly striking, at this moment, is the show’s carefree comedy approach to the low-level war between the settler population and the local native Americans that makes every journey to or from Deadwood a perilous business.

“Oh the Deadwood stage is rolling on over the hills,” goes the original lyric of the iconic song Whip Crack Away, “full of injun arrows thicker than porcupine quills”; and although this 21st century version of the show simply erases all mention of the native American population, it’s hard to avoid the truth that these gun-toting jolly frontier folk are essentially securing their hold over the land by killing off the existing population.

It’s more than interesting, in other words, at this moment, to see the dark underbelly of US history presented in a such a breezy style; and the whole spectacle is delivered with terrific energy and panache by an impressive 20-strong company of actor-dancer-musicians, who play the music instruments-in-hand throughout, and are led in fine style by actress, singer and hugely popular online influencer Carrie Hope Fletcher, whose presence packs the theatre to the rafters with an excited crowd dressed up in cowboy hats.

And if the final effect is, in its way, slightly more chilling than heartwarming, then this is a production that seems to understand the story’s inherent contradictions, while belting it out anyway, with fantastic energy and skill.

Another strong woman features, meanwhile, in Nikki Kalkman’s new Play, Pie, Pint lunchtime monologue Jocasta, a 50-minute monologue for the famous queen of Thebes delivered in a strong Scots voice, with a strangely excessive early use of the f-word. Jocasta, after all, was a great lady; even if she was the notorious queen who unknowingly married her own long-lost son Oedipus, and bore him four children.

Once the story takes hold, through, Zoe Hunter delivers an increasingly powerful and moving performance as the recently dead Jocasta. She finds herself in a kind of limbo, where the gods who have toyed with her fate demand that she entertains them by recounting her life story; and she does, telling the tale of her terrible marriage at 13 to the brutal Laius, of the prophecy that led him to order the death of their baby son, and of the deep, sensual joy she found, after Laius’s death, with the young warrior Oedipus, an apparent newcomer to the city.

It all ends in tragedy, of course, and in suicide for Jocasta when she realises the truth. Kalkman’s play, though – in Kate Nelson’s production – at least invites us to see her not only as a victim of history and the cruel gods; but also as another strong and courageous female gambler, who seized her chance of happiness, and seemed for a while to hold a glorious winning hand, before losing it all, in horror and despair.

Calamity Jane at the Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, until tomorrow, and at the King’s Theatre, Glasgow, 1-5 July. Jocasta at Oran Mor, Glasgow, until tomorrow.