Rannou's Wordless Western 'Hostile' Hits Edinburgh
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- Olivier Rannou stars in and designed the set for 'Hostile,' a wordless one-man western produced by French company Bakélite at Edinburgh's Church Hill Theatre until 11 August.
- The solo performance relies on mime and clowning — a rattlesnake conjured from string, cacti from planks of wood — to depict a stranded cowboy fighting for survival in a desert strewn with skeletal remains.
- Émilie Rougier composed the electronic score, which shifts between an electric-didgeridoo-like drone and tinkly fairground tunes to flip the mood from light to dark.
- Alan Floc'h and Alexandre Musset designed lighting that evokes a relentlessly glaring desert sun or eerie night, while Rannou's set morphs a table into larger objects — including a wooden horse that clops offstage, built before the audience's eyes.
- Reviewers described the piece as both Beckettian and cartoonish, pairing existential dread with Road Runner-style mishaps and skeletons drawn as comic memento mori.
Why it matters: Bakélite's wordless entry, running at Church Hill Theatre through 11 August, stands out in a festival crowded with dialogue-driven shows by substituting mime, prop-making and an electronic score for any scripted narrative — a formal gamble that tests whether purely physical theatre can carry emotional weight without words.
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