At about half past seven on Tuesday night at the Tricycle in north London, I had a revelation. There were no angels, and nobody else in the theatre would have noticed. It was just the quiet realisation, about 20 minutes into the press night of Sam Shepard's True West, that it really is a very good play indeed.
Now of course I know that Shepard's 1980 drama, about two brothers – an aspiring screenwriter and a thieving drifter – having a wild west-style showdown in their mother's Hollywood house, offers a vision of masculinity in crisis in a land where myth has long turned sour. I also know that it is considered a modern classic. Every piece of theatre publicity for every production I've ever seen of the play has always told me so. Categorically.
It's one of those plays whose status is so assured that to start questioning it feels a bit like asking whether King Lear is any good. But the truth is that, although I've seen some adequate productions of True West over the last 30 years, until Tuesday I had never seen a revival that convinced me that the play's modern-classic status was valid. The acting always felt like so much posturing, and until Phillip Breen's thrillingly performed production I never really witnessed the play's text and subtext, metaphor and staged reality firing on all cylinders together. The sense is palpable in this version that the brothers are endlessly chasing each other and an impossible dream.
I missed the famed 1994 Matthew Warchus version at the Donmar with Mark Rylance and Michael Rudko alternating the roles of good guy Austin and bad boy Lee. Warchus also staged the play in New York in 2000 with Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C Reilly doing the same. Maybe if I'd seen either of these productions, my eyes would have been opened earlier to the power of Shepard's dark vision.
But I didn't, which made me think that there must be thousands of theatregoers who think Hamlet or A View from the Bridge are a bit rubbish and Three Sisters terribly dull and overrated, because they've just not been lucky enough to see a great revival of these classic plays. So I'd love to hear about the classics you thought you didn't rate and the productions that were a revelation and made you change your mind.
