Some plays grow richer with time. I can’t say that Sam Shepard’s 1983 piece about obsessive passion is one of them. It comes equipped, as the final production in this pop-up theatre on Charing Cross Road, with two star actors – Adam Rothenberg and Lydia Wilson, who share a past in Ripper Street – but something of the play’s visceral power has evaporated with the years.
Part of the problem lies with the space. Shepard’s play is set in a motel room on the edge of the Mojave desert where Eddie, a rancher turned stuntman, has come to reclaim his half-sister, May, who now works as a waitress. I’ve never forgotten the original New York production, where the actors hurled themselves against the walls of the set with bone-shaking violence. This is a play about confinement but, although lights flicker every time a door bangs in Simon Evans’s production, you never feel you are watching two caged animals. Ben Stones’s design, in fact, opens up on to a vista of desert scrub that gives the characters room to breathe.
Shepard writes persuasively about two incestuous lovers caught up in an endless cycle of separation and reunion, but one also notices the laziness of his dramaturgy. At one point he keeps May off stage for an improbably long time to give Eddie the chance to intimidate her nervous gentleman caller. The action also comes to a dead halt as Eddie, May and the choric Old Man who haunts their imagination give their contradictory accounts of the past.
Although the play rehearses Shepard’s familiar theme of the decline of the American west, you can’t help feeling that countless movies, starting with Lonely Are the Brave in 1962, have made the point move vividly.
It is, however, a play for actors. Rothenberg, with his gaunt features and wiry frame, suggests what Shakespeare’s Rosalind calls “the very wrath of love”. But there is a tell-tale moment when Eddie, with insolent ease, uses a rope to lasso four bedposts, “never missing” according to the stage directions. Rothenberg repeatedly misses and, while this may be a directorial choice, it also casts doubt on the idea that Eddie is a natural cowboy living in the romantic myths of the past.
Wilson is eminently watchable as May but doesn’t manage the transition from “tough drabness”, specified in the stage directions, to dressed-up date since she is first seen in figure-hugging denim shorts. Nevertheless, Wilson conveys well the fretful uncertainty that leads May to kiss Eddie passionately before kneeing him in the groin, and she uses her expressive eyes to suggest that sibling love is a disease for which there is no cure.
Luke Neal as her tentative suitor and Joe McGann as the leathery Old Man who oversees the action lend good support. I can’t, however, better the description of New York critic Frank Rich who called Shepard’s play an “indoor rodeo”. It is precisely that element of enclosed animalism I find missing here.
• At Found111, London, until 17 December. Box office: 020-7478 0100.
