Stage crew spoil the joke in Shepard’s dark comedy
True West Vaudeville ★★★★★
For a play about two grown, increasingly growling men – brothers bound in rivalry, prickly as cacti, embodiments of the restive and dislocated male psyche – the late Sam Shepard’s True West is a remarkably delicate flower. Set it down in the wrong place, fail to moisten it with sufficient droplets of subtle directorial care, and a dark comedy of wild pungency can wilt into something oddly odourless.
Its off-broadway premiere at the Public Theater in 1980 was a notorious flop. Yet it can astound – witness the hit New York production two years later: John Malkovich caused a big stir as Lee, the malcontent scavenger who visits his younger LA screenwriter sibling Austin and winds up weirdly trading places, proffering his own pitch to the latter’s film-producer contact, the situation – and their mental equilibriums – unravelling from there. The recording of that version (with Gary Sinise as Austin) holds good; Malko transfixingly coltish and impish.
Now, just ahead of a fresh Broadway revival, starring Ethan Hawke and Paul Dano, with a British director (James Macdonald) at the helm, here’s a production that – belatedly – brings the play to the West End for the first time.
Kit Harington – who can count for ages hence on an army of fans, thanks to his prowess-packed turn as lynchpin Game of Thrones character Jon Snow – takes the role, against rugged type, of the desk-bound, sweatily creative Austin. And as Lee, director Matthew Dunster has cast the more boyish, if older, Johnny Flynn – a revelation as the insouciant cockney interloper in his production of Martin Mcdonagh’s Hangmen in 2015. They’re almost a dream team. What’s hugely frustrating is that they’re hobbled by the show’s remediable deficiencies.
Granted, Shepard left logistical headaches: his scenes are short, often cutting off at tantalising moments of confrontation. The sweltering Southern Californian suburban dwelling – belonging to the pair’s mom, invaded by the sound of crickets – gets ever more trashed, requiring the attention of stage crew. Yet the between-scenes prop-setting is done in plain view (albeit in subdued light); you can tolerate this only up to a point.
It should be a scream that Austin, morphing into a rogue male as his own project gets sidelined, bedecks the living-room with stolen toasters. If you’ve seen them being calmly placed by stage-management the effect is muted – and a similar frustration attends the distraction of an interval just 40 minutes in.
If the evening needs to look more rock ’n’ roll, less like a roughed-up version of The Odd Couple, there’s still enough to savour for the initiated and uninitiated alike. Having been as wooden as a Westeros drawbridge in a dire Faustus two years ago, a heavily moustachioed Harington proves his mettle in this latest stage outing. Initially hunched, bespectacled, old before his time and very much of his period, he’s afraid, resentful, envious too of his untamed older brother, who materialises like a phantom when Austin lights a candle amid Jon Bausor’s perspective-skewed interior. For his part, Flynn conjures a due sense of outward macho poise and latent insecurity: chain-smoking, beer- and liquor-swigging – and, when the going gets testy, swinging a golf club with calculated abandon.
As the duo degenerate – Harington drunkenly crawling like a hairy man-baby – the biting humour and feral truth of Shepard’s vision of an America lost in its identity-forging myths and subsumed by a biblical doom, starts seeping, with intoxicating potency, into your bloodstream. Come the arrival of Madeleine Potter’s affectless Mom, surveying an attempted strangulation, hands in pockets, as if she was noticing a speck on the carpet, it’s pretty much perfect in its peculiarity.
A good kick with the stirrups earlier on then, and it’d be away.
The dream team of Harington and Flynn are hobbled by the show’s remediable deficiencies
Until Feb 16. Tickets: 0330 333 4814; nimaxtheatres.com