True West, Tricycle - theatre review

Alex Ferns is on sensational form in this revival of Sam Shepard’s cult Eighties play
Madness: Alex Ferns as Lee and Eugene O'Hare as Austin in True West (Picture: Alastair Muir/Rex)
Henry Hitchings23 September 2014

There’s a moment in the second half of this explosive black comedy when perhaps as many as 20 toasters litter the stage. Alex Ferns’s Lee and his buttoned-up brother Austin (Eugene O’Hare) are floundering in the midst of a grotesque mess that they’ve created. Lee is attacking a typewriter with a golf club, Austin is unravelling spectacularly, and surrealism is thick in the air.

It’s a ludicrously over-the-top scene and the highlight of Phillip Breen’s revival of Sam Shepard’s cult Eighties play. Here, for a few wild minutes, Shepard’s vision of sibling rivalry and artistic fallibility seems rich and spontaneous, and Max Jones’s design is able to lay bare the workings of the brothers’ relationship.

The strangeness of their bond is clear from the start. When they meet for the first time in five years at their mother’s house in California, finicky screenwriter Austin and lawless drifter Lee revisit old arguments and jealousies.

But their roles soon begin to reverse. Lee captures the interest of film producer Saul (Steven Elliot) with an idea for a real-life Western. Saul has previously nurtured Austin, and the brothers find themselves collaborating on this new project — a development that tests their sanity.

The conflict illustrates the tensions that exist in all creative partnerships — and indeed within every creative person, as fantasy and ambition chafe against the forces of pragmatism.

Breen savours the violence of Shepard’s writing while Ferns, who is on sensational form, exudes menace from every fibre of his being. But the play itself is uneven and repetitive, a series of sometimes dazzling riffs rather than a satisfying whole.

Until October 4 (020 7328 1000, tricycle.co.uk)

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