You can see why Kit Harington and Johnny Flynn were drawn to Sam Shepard’s 1980 play. It’s a poetic paean to the vanishing American west and a classic study of sibling rivalry that offers two cracking main roles. But, enjoyable as Matthew Dunster’s revival is, I felt the play works best in small theatres and that the central pairing doesn’t achieve a perfect balance.
Shepard is clearly, through the portrait of two brothers, dramatising his bifurcated self as well as exploring the American psyche. Austin is a spruce, clean-cut writer who has retreated to his mother’s southern California house to finish a screenplay. His plans are disrupted by the arrival of the far-from-fraternal Lee, a petty thief and drunken drifter who has just spent three months in the Mojave desert. Lee not only intimidates his brother but muscles in on Austin’s relationship with a Hollywood producer by coming up with his own bankable idea for a western. In a virtual identity swap, Lee seeks to assume the role of the family writer, while Austin turns burglar and hankers for a nomadic life in the desert.
It is a play full of echoes. Shepard’s ability to embody his own internal divisions through his main characters reminds me of Pinter’s No Man’s Land. A once-iconic American play by Jean-Claude van Itallie, Motel, in which two people trash a motel room, also leaps to mind. For all that, Shepard has his own distinctive voice. It is one that views the domestication of the American wilderness and the disintegration of the family with a rueful regret. But it is a voice sharply alert to life’s absurdities: Austin comically lines up a set of toasters he has stolen to prove his derring-do and the brothers reminisce about their drunken father’s loss of his false teeth in a doggie-bag crammed with chop suey.
Shepard also writes superbly for actors. Lee and Austin are both two sides of a single personality and yet wildly different: they represent, to put it crudely, the instinctual and intellectual aspects of the American character. While Harington and Flynn are fine actors, my only complaint is that they are too alike in that they both rely on a strong, highly sexualised charisma. Harington as Austin has to work overtime to suggest he is a passive, deskbound screenwriter. Equally, Flynn struggles to convey the idea of Lee’s secret longings for stability and quietude.
But, at their best, the two actors are very good. Harington is especially convincing in the later stages as Austin unleashes his inner fury aiming wild, drunken swings at the empty air and threatening to strangle his brother with a whipcord. Flynn also captures Lee’s initial menace as he hovers in a bullying manner over his brother and turns a golf-club swing into a virtual death threat.
It’s a sign of Shepard’s generosity that the two other roles offer actors plenty to get their teeth into. Donald Sage Mackay as the Hollywood producer shows the gullibility of his breed, though I can’t believe he would never have heard of an iconic movie such as Lonely Are the Brave. Madeleine Potter also conveys the detachment from reality of the brothers’ disorientated mother. Even if the central casting leaves something to be desired, it remains a pungent Shepard’s pie.
At the Vaudeville theatre, London, until 16 February. Box office: 0330 333 4814.
