Time has not been kind to Sam Shepard's play. What looked mythic in 1985 now seems meandering. In an age of dramatic compressionism, one wishes that Shepard would get on with it. I still admire his gift for potent imagery, but this particular three-hour play now has the faintly outmoded quality of an epic Western.
In a way, that's just what it is: both a quest play and a family drama, which owes as much to The Searchers as it does to Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams and Shepard's own previous studies of dysfunctional intimates. On one level it's an emotional search: the jealous Jake has battered his wife Beth, yet still yearns for her while being tended by his incestuously adoring mother.
But it's also about a physical search: Jake's brother tracks the brain-damaged Beth to the home of her crazed Montana parents and is promptly shot in the leg by her deer-hunting father. Eventually Jake joins in the search, but not before symbolically wrapping himself in the American flag.
Shepard, too, wraps himself in the flag. He's clearly saying that it's a big country where families live in a state of Oedipal tension, where the battle between the male and female principles is still unresolved. and where the conformist ideal conceals a cranky oddity.
This certainly leads to some wild humour, particularly in the portrait of Beth's backwoods family. But what I once interpreted as Shepard's charity towards American idiosyncrasy now looks like a supine conservatism. Jake's cruelty towards Beth is seen as a perverse kind of love. Women, it's implied, need men, while the male cherishes his roving independence.And Beth's gun-toting father is implicitly redeemed by his reverence for the flag. Forget mythic resonance - this is pure bullshit.
Wilson Milam's production lacks the onstage bluegrass music that originally camouflaged the work's reactionary stance under a veneer of lyricism. But the acting is good. Andy Serkis as the infantile Jake and Sinead Cusack as his indecently possessive mother make a suitably alarming duo.
Catherine McCormack as the badly damaged Beth, Keith Bartlett as her deer-hunting dad and Anna Calder-Marshall as her batty mother offer a tragi-comic portrait of the American family. On a soporific evening, however, one can't help wondering why the Donmar chose to dig up this old Shepard.
· Until September 1. Box office: 020-7369 1732.
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