This powerful telling of America’s history from South Africa’s fix+foxy turns the perspective of the Western on its head. It’s alarming, frightening, funny, employs beautiful creativity and portrays desolate cruelty with a compassion informed by a deep history of trauma. It’s brilliant. And not only draws light to a past littered with hope and horrors, but also some understanding of the foundations of the troubles currently playing out in the USA.
The stage starts open, sparse but for the sandy earth, with two men in whiteface sizing each other up, a single human-tumbleweed accenting the location. They draw their guns – and both fall. “White lives matter,” an amplified voice comments. And the unspoken political parallel lingers on as step by step the performance space is built upon, physically reflecting the expanse of the pioneers into the American West, inviting audience participation and integration into their homestead. Generous and brutal.
The players tell the histories in chapters, sharing narration duties straight to camera, as well as handheld close ups of incidents as they unfurl. Music and dance flow in and out of the landscape, drawing on so many genres – from a capella jazz to drill, and even a line dance.
Fix + foxy show heartbreaking compassion for their subjects. Taking language used by the white west to describe Africans and reflecting it back with white faces and blonde wigs. Upon the starvation that drove the Europeans out to America, their savagery towards each other, brutal desperation as gold fever takes over. It shows the effect of persistently living on the edge of survival, that pops the romanticism of the Hollywood version of the west.
Brighton Dome Corn Exchange, 21-24 May 2026, 8pm (23rd & 24th, 2pm), from £20
