Robinson has written a sensitive adaptation, and the team are justified in wanting their work to be widely seen. Think of the poster for the Aids drama Longtime Companion (“A motion picture for everyone”) or the trailer for Torch Song Trilogy (“It’s not just about some people – it’s about everyone”) or Tom Ford plugging his film A Single Man (“It’s not a gay story”). That’s why we’re reluctant to go, ‘Oh it’s a queer story.’”Īll of which comes straight from the Hollywood playbook of selling LGBTQ+ product.
Ennis could be a straight man going through a complex negotiation of his sexuality.” Sells agrees: “Of course, it’s about two men who fall in love and have sex. I don’t want it to feel niche.” Surely he isn’t arguing that the characters aren’t gay? “It’s not my job to assert anyone’s identity. It’s a story of fear, and how it corrupts love.” He is singing from the same hymn sheet as Diana Ossana, who co-wrote the film with Larry McMurtry and said in 2006 that it concerned “two obviously gay people too afraid to actually commit to their love, so they run off and marry women and live a life unfulfilled out of fear.”īut the director isn’t keen on that “gay” tag. People often say Brokeback Mountain is a love story. “It’s about the deep regret that Ennis still holds on to. “It’s essentially a memory play,” says Butterell.
Entering the auditorium, theatregoers will see a sixtysomething man asleep on stage – this is the older Ennis, who is present throughout as he gazes back at his younger self. ‘It’s a story of fear – and how it corrupts love’ … composer Dan Gillespie Sells and director Jonathan Butterell. But within a few hours of receiving Robinson’s proposal, she assented. Now 87, she told the Paris Review nine years ago that she wished she’d never written Brokeback Mountain because of all the deluded fan fiction it inspired. Those words were in the pitch he made to Proulx, who can be a tricky customer. “Music has the ability to communicate the passage of time and the magnitude of space, providing a strong juxtaposition with the sparse rough language of the characters.” “I was trying to figure out how to capture the inner landscape of Ennis, who really doesn’t say a lot,” he tells me. They evoke a world.” Music was a central part of Robinson’s vision when he began writing the play six years ago. The 13 original songs that Sells has written will, he says, “speak to the action without narrating it.
Here we do it through music.”Ī country balladeer, played by the flame-haired Eddi Reader of Fairground Attraction, will perform on stage during the show, accompanied by a five-strong band. Ang Lee did that in the film with cinematography. What we can do is bring you the poetry of Annie Proulx. There’d be no way of writing that libretto. Why not? “A song lets the audience into an internal dialogue,” explains Sells. ‘Sparse rough language’ … Heath Ledger, left, and Jake Gyllenhaal in the film.
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