Brokeback Mountain, a play with music, opens in a scruffy bedroom where a snowy-haired tramp finds a lumberjack’s shirt and places it over his nose. Then he inhales. Who is this elderly vagrant? And why is he absorbing the scent of an abandoned garment? Two hours later, at the play’s close, we finally learn that the old man, Ennis, is sniffing a shirt that once belonged to Jack Twist who became his lover while they worked as shepherds in Wyoming.

Yes, shepherds. The ‘gay cowboy’ label is a misnomer because the lads are ranching sheep, and their affair belongs to the half-forgotten days of homosexual persecution. The precise year, 1963, is signalled to us with a clunky line from Jack about JFK’s decision to escalate America’s involvement in Vietnam. ‘It might get better before it gets worse,’ opines Ennis. And that’s the last we hear of politics.

Alone in the hills, the lusty shepherds spend a couple of scenes furtively ogling each other’s bodies during their morning ablutions and then bang! They make love inside a scout tent whose diaphanous fabric is tastefully lit from within so that their coition is presented in a suggestive outline without any hint of onstage porn. Students of European cinema will recall that the same device was used in the 1969 classic, Carry on Camping, starring Terry Scott and Barbara Windsor.

The shepherds pound each other senseless all summer, then they split up, get married, start families and embrace tedium in the suburbs. Over a 20-year period, they meet intermittently for hasty and hyper-athletic sexual trysts but they’re unable to live as a normal couple. Both shepherds are plainly tedious as characters. Ennis rarely speaks and Jack talks non-stop but says nothing of value. In this respect they resemble Alec and Laura in Brief Encounter. But the lack of personality doesn’t matter because it’s their predicament, not their characters, that excites our sympathy.

The shepherds consider escaping to Mexico where they might pursue their affair in private but they choose to stay in the Midwest and to enjoy brief, risky encounters whenever the opportunity arises. Perhaps something in their natures craves the exquisite torment of forbidden love.

The show is marred by some puzzling choices. The set looks unappealing, even ugly: the tramp’s scruffy bedsit is supplemented by a filthy kitchen unit and a disorderly campfire. Why no hint of Wyoming’s ravishing landscapes? During pauses in the action, a band of five musicians tootle forth a series of blues melodies but the shepherds themselves don’t break into song. The presence of these costumed musicians diminishes the rawness and immediacy of the drama and makes it feel like a civic exhibition staged for a crowd of yawning aldermen in a town hall. On press night, at the curtain call, the crowd erupted with ecstasies of delight that hardly seemed justified by the humdrum quality of the entertainment. Yet the actors had to keep returning to the stage to acknowledge fresh waves of applause. This was baffling, to one viewer at least.

Bleak Expectations is a Dickens spoof narrated by a different celebrity each week. At press night, Sally Phillips did the honours, script in hand, not always accurately. The central character, Pip Bin, is a young squire whose cosy childhood is wrecked by the death of his father during a plundering expedition to the ‘south Indies’. Pip’s mother, mad with grief, spends the rest of her life ironing sheets and spouting proto-feminist slogans: ‘Votes for linen!’

Pip and his sisters, Pippa and Poppy, are preyed on by an evil rotter who plans to marry Pippa and to steal Pip’s inheritance by sending him to a corrupt school whose headmaster murders rich young pupils on their 18th birthday. Pip discovers the plot, evades execution and becomes an entrepreneur. He’s about to make a fortune from a waste-disposal device, ‘the Bin’, but an American rival, Mr Trash Can, sues Pip for infringing his worldwide patent on an identical gadget. You get the idea?

It’s a frivolous, punning Milligan-esque satire whose targets are safe and easy to attack. The script features political speeches by Pippa and Poppy who deplore the lack of opportunity for women in the medical profession. But the show unwittingly perpetuates the prejudice it seeks to disparage. The female characters are a monochrome posse of halfwitted, gabbling dollybirds whereas the male figures are a lot more varied, and give the cast far richer opportunities to display their gifts. Marc Pickering is on excellent form playing a sadistic pervert, Whackwell Hardthrasher. Dom Hodson shines as Pip, the charming but unthreatening goofball. John Hopkins is superb playing the hypocritical predator, Gently Benevolent. He gets big laughs from lines that most actors would just throw away. Hopkins is among the finest comedians on the English stage.