It was set in the American West, and now Brokeback Mountain will be playing in London’s West End.

Based on the New Yorker short story by Annie Proulx, and described as a “play with music,” the production will have a 12-week run at the Sohoplace Theatre beginning on May 10. Directed by Jonathan Butterell, Brokeback Mountain will star Mike Faist and Lucas Hedges as the two cowboys who fell in love with each other while herding sheep in the rugged Wyoming landscape.

Butterell won accolades for his direction of Everybody’s Talking About Jamie, a stage musical based on the true story of a 16-year-old British drag queen. It featured music by Dan Gillespie Sells, who will also be composing some of the music for the new West End production.

In the upcoming stage version, Faist will play the role of Jack Twist while Hedges will be playing Ennis Del Mar. The script is being penned by Ashley Robinson. Sells’s music will be performed by singer-songwriter Eddi Reader, accompanied by a country and western band with a pedal steel guitarist.

Producer Nica Burns, who also owns the Sohoplace Theatre, was quoted as saying that the new production would be based more directly on Proulx’s 1997 short story and not on Ang Lee’s 2005 film that starred Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, which took some liberties with the text.

Hedges will soon appear in Shirley, a biopic by John Ridley about Shirley Chisholm of Brooklyn, the first Black congresswoman. Faist is appearing in Challengers, an upcoming comedy by Luca Guadagnino that has been described as “a fizzy, sexy…love triangle with queer undertones.” It will be released on August 11.



Ang Lee’s filmic version of Brokeback Mountain won several Oscars and was a Best Picture nominee, only to lose out to Crash when the final envelope was opened. It grossed $178 worldwide from a $14 million budget. In 2018, the Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.



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