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

Church Hill theatre, Edinburgh
At the Edinburgh international festival, Olivier Rannou’s lone cowboy encounters desert dangers in a mix of clowning, mime and visual trickery

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.