Cowboy Mouth is an obscure play, and it doesn’t shy away from admitting it. The director’s notes claim that as an audience we should just be “voyeurs” of this destructive relationship between rock star Patti Smith and playwright Sam Shephard (both of whom wrote the play with thinly disguised versions of themselves as characters). That we shouldn’t understand the obscure references and 70s hipster jargon, that we should sit back and watch it all from afar. Well, I am quite happy to not understand a play I am watching, but I’m afraid I need at least to feel that I want to understand it.

This is a play about a decadent rock’n’roll lifestyle, in a traditional trashed hotel room full of empty booze bottles and pictures of Rimbaud. It is so rock’n’roll, in fact, it believes it doesn’t need to bother with a plot, or characters we can relate to, or much wit, or any reason much to care about these self-absorbed people. We just watch Tom Russell’s Slim and Jessica O’Driscoll Breen’s Cavale stumble around their squalid hole mumbling about fantasy pets and suddenly verbally abusing each other as their relationship collapses. I have actually always thought that the stereotypical life of rockstar decadence is pretty boring, and this play did nothing to convince me otherwise.

Shephard has written great plays, but confined here to writing about himself he becomes lazy and self-indulgent: lines comparing rock to a new religion might have been daring in 1971 (and even then it’s pushing it) but now they are just clichés; and there is really no excuse for a line like “I like rivers. I love the way they go wherever they want”. This is not so much the championing of bohemian freedom in On the Road as Anakin declaring “I hate sand” in the Star Wars prequels.

Watching two totally self-absorbed people on stage for an hour does not have a “peculiar beauty”, as director Jack Parlett suggests, but just turns the audience off. They talk in their own closed language. Why should we care? There are occasional random drum segments, a Lobster Man turns up a couple of times. And? It doesn’t show the emptiness at the heart of the countercultural lifestyle, it just makes it look very dull. An illustration of this can be found by talking to your average stoner for five minutes; fifty five plus entrance fee is pushing it.

The only way I can imagine this play working is if the performers were unstoppable incandescent dervishes of energy and fire, making us feel, if not understand the importance of their world. Sadly, both Russell and O’Driscoll Breen are merely quite good. He flies back and forth across the stage in his pent-up anger, she lolls about in endless stupor in a nice duo dynamic. Yet there is an endless hint of Irish coming through on O’Driscoll Breen’s side which never quite fades from her American accent, and Russell never quite convinces at his most passionate. It is a shame they both have very difficult material from which to elicit a spark.

While the set is a fine one and there are sparks of good poetic language here and there, the decision to put on this play remains an odd one. Perhaps a radically different delivery would have eased matters,  but as it stands it is a picture of a relationship far too intimate too let any of us in – or feel we’d really want to be. 

Cowboy Mouth plays at the Corpus Playroom at 9.30pm until Saturday