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true west
Review

true west

November 7 2010

TRUE WEST, Wharf 1, Sydney Theatre Company; November 2-December 18, 2010. Photos: Brett Boardman

THE VISUAL key to this very fine STC production of Sam Shepard’s 1980 play is the wallpaper. Its almost-elegant stylised pattern is fatally undermined by the dominant colour of burnt orange: it shrieks late 1970s and not in any way tunefully (set design Richard Roberts, costumes Alice Babidge). The key to the play itself is an observation by Shepard in the program notes’ interview. Answering a question about his own alcoholism he says of his father’s side of the family: “That side’s got a real tough strain of alcoholism. It goes back generations and generations, so that you can’t remember when there was a sober grandfather.” It’s classic Shephard: tough-minded, unsentimental, yet mordantly humorous.

True West book-ends what has become known, among critics at least, as the STC’s “American season”. Although, like trying to corral a decade into an impossibly neat ten years, the season was more than that. It began, unofficially but powerfully in May 2009, with the Education Program’s wonderful production of Arthur Miller’s great 1953 play, The Crucible. It continued into the stratosphere in September with the brilliant A Streetcar Named Desire (Tennessee Williams, 1947); soared in December and into January 2010 with a riveting new work by Steven Soderbergh and cast in Tot Mom. It suffered a setback otherwise known as the William Hurt-led train wreck of Eugene O’Neill’s 1956 drama, Long Day’s Journey Into Night (made memorable only by the invincible Robyn Nevin). That grim experience was erased by US visitors Steppenwolf and their glorious staging of Tracey Letts’ 2007 smash hit August: Osage County; and that in turn was equalled by Iain Sinclair’s exceptional production of Our Town, Thornton Wilder’s pastorale of 1938. (For a characteristically idiosyncratic and provoking overview of the American Season have a look at James Waites' blog – when you've finished reading this!)

Now, the “season” comes to an end with yet another exploration of an aspect of the American Century and its abiding myth, the American Dream. This time it’s “the West” – the wide-open frontier where cowboys rode free and fearless and the sunsets were always glorious and promised a bright tomorrow. Its influence on the American psyche and – through Hollywood – the rest of the world, has been much greater than the 40-50 years of its existence at the latter end of the 19th century, but it persists still. Shepard uses the myth as the engine of this monstrously powerful play, which is as lovingly and sardonically realised as anything else he’s written.

It’s set in the California home of a woman whose screenwriter son is staying there to take care of her indoor plants while she takes a trip to Alaska. Austin (Brendan Cowell) sits at the kitchen table feverishly writing by candlelight. It’s as if he’s playing at being an obsessed writer – a Hemingway figure, perhaps – who is as caught up in the deliberately theatrical act of writing as he is in what he’s scribbling on paper.

Watching him from the shadows, beer can in hand, is his elder brother Lee (Wayne Blair). Lee is a drifter, a grifter, a loser, but one who palpably disdains the effete writer – the citified type who can only invent cowboys and the desert, but who has never been there. Austin and Lee are polar opposites: Austin is Ivy League educated, bookish, physically timid and emotionally passive. Lee – as his younger brother waspishly observes at one point – can barely write his own name; he is proudly physical and ignorant and reeks of menace and loosely wrapped energy. It’s a combustible mix and the inevitable explosion is brought about by the imminent arrival of movie producer Saul Kimmer (Alan Dukes).

true west

Suddenly, but subtly under Philip Seymour Hoffman’s tightly reined direction, Lee’s aggression becomes a knowingly infuriating passive aggression. Simultaneously Austin’s patient and timorous behaviour towards his brother stumbles into frustration and a succession of beer cans and a whiskey bottle. When the two reversing trajectories finally meet in mid-air the collision is cataclysmic for actors, props, audience and story alike. Blair and Cowell are cast against their usual stereotypes and if either has given a better performance, I didn’t see it.

The two are convincing as brothers and as the men whose reversals of fortune mirror so much of what was going on in the America of the time, socially and politically. It’s also a very personal and visceral play and it’s impossible to say aloof from Austin’s fear and frustration, or from Lee’s thinly veiled menace. It’s a mini-master stroke too – or simply serendipity – that the disbelief and despair Austin feels, when his brother forces the bigshot producer to invite him to play golf, is upended by the actor’s ability with a golf club. When Wayne Blair irritates the crap out of his sibling with some practice swings in the kitchen-conservatory, it’s obvious that he can really do it. It adds an unexpected dimension and layer of emotion to the scene.

True West is dynamic, challenging and entertaining. It will shock, provoke laughter and probably affect your attitude to toast for quite some time. Alan Dukes and Heather Mitchell (a brief, outraged and effective appearance by this terrific actress) give excellent support in their cameo roles. However, it’s really a two-hander and both Wayne Blair and Brendan Cowell are superb. The play is a classic Shepard mix of the real and the surreal. Laughter one minute, gasps of shock or horror the next.

The STC’s American Season has been a fascinating and rewarding 19 months and I’ve loved it, bum note and all.

 

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