Buried Child

by Sam Shepard

seen at the Trafalgar Studios on 5 January 2017

Scott Elliott directs Ed Harris as Dodge and Amy Madigan as his wife Halie in this Gothic horror version of American family life. The two senior actors (also actually husband and wife) are ably supported by Barnaby Kay and Gary Shelford as their sons Tilden and Bradley (the first psychologically damaged and the second one-legged after a possibly self-inflicted chainsaw "accident") and by Jeremy Irvine as Tilden's son Vince and Charlotte Hope as his Californian girlfriend Shelly.

The play is set in the living room inhabited by the decrepit patriarch Dodge - he is on stage coughing and watching TV from his sofa as the audience files in. It is raining and there are leaks being caught in buckets and pans. When the play starts, it is with a peculiar dialogue between Dodge and the unseen Halie who is upstairs preparing herself to go out to meet the local minister. When she finally appears the lack of engagement between the two is acutely underlined as her somewhat faded smartness contrasts with his utter dishevelment. 

The weirdness of the situation begins to assert itself with the appearance of Tilden, one of their two surviving sons. Halie's adulation for her dead son can be taken as so much maternal hero-worship (though the religiosity is a bit disconcerting), but Tilden is another matter. He has returned from New Mexico in unexplained circumstances and is living on sufferance in the family home. He comes in carrying cobs of corn from a back yard which his parents claim has been completely barren since 1935. He is also clearly under extreme mental stress. Halie leaves the two men alone with strict instructions that are obviously going to be ignored one way or another. The tensions between father and son are unspoken but spill into their surface disagreements; finally Dodge is asleep and Tilden departs with his father's whiskey bottle, allowing the other son Bradley to creep in and make preparations to clip his father's hair.

This is all the first act - a rather muted affair which is hard to read. The performances are fine but the overall effect perplexing rather than chilling or gripping.

The second act sees the arrival of Vince and Shelly, calling in unexpectedly from New York on their way to New Mexico, where Vince presumes his father still is. They arrive in a thunderstorm and the house is apparently deserted; at first neither notices the recumbent Dodge and Shelly is gratingly unsympathetic to Vince's nervousness at coming home. Soon both are out of their depth as Dodge refuses to acknowledge that he even has a grandson, and then when Tilden appears he also seems baffled by the idea that he might be the boy's father. Amidst unpleasant bouts of misogyny and wheedling demands from Dodge that Vince should go out to buy more alcohol, the two youngsters are pressured into separating, with Shelly left alone to deal with Dodge and Tilden. The situation is creepy, and only made worse by Bradley's reappearance.

The final act shows Shelly attempting to exert some control by making bouillon for Dodge - he refuses to drink it. When Halie returns (with the minister) she is outraged to find a strange young woman in her house and then simply tries to ignore her existence. In fact the whole family carries on for a few moments as if the girl were no more than an annoying distraction from their usual concerns, until she hurls some crockery and demands attention. Only then does Dodge reveal the family secret that has been poisoning all their lives, though Bradley tries to forestall him and Halie simply responds by claiming it is all lies. The increasingly hapless pastor is both appalled and immobilised .

Vince returns roaring drunk and destructive (he had been faux-sophisticated and a bit crass before); now the family recognises him and Dodge even bequeaths him the house. At the end, he is the new patriarch, donning Dodge's cap and taking his position on the sofa, unaffected by Shelly's departure and ready to sweep out the "vermin" of the previous generation. Halie, once again upstairs, remarks that the back yard is full of corn ....

Obviously there is a good deal more going on here than just the examination of an inward-looking and damaged family.  The idolised but no longer available son, the hidden family secret, the drinking, the wife's brittle recourse to religion, the cruel lacerations between father and sons, are all grist to the dramatic mill. But the sheer strangeness of the infertile then fertile back lot, the complete failure to recognise the grandson followed by the equally complete acceptance of him, and the details of the family secret (not to mention Tilden's final retrieval from the back yard) transform the tale of dysfunction into something far more lurid. 

Does it work? As I said, the performances are excellent, so that all the interactions work well. Ed Harris's Dodge is truculent, obsessed, vengeful, but rarely over the top, which renders his few outbursts of real rage all the more startling. His long monologue disposing of his property is an extraordinary feat, rendering long lists of farm equipment mesmerising to listen to even as his voice sinks away almost to nothing. Around him the others hold their own and impose a weird coherence on the turn of events - even Vince's transformation from urban sophisticate to violent drunkard is superbly handled by Jeremy Irvine (with the benefit of a long absence from the stage). 

However, the overall tone of the production does militate against complete success. The physical details of the setting are perhaps just too meticulous, and the pace a shade too slow and reverential, to allow the collision between the humdrum and the nightmarish to have an overwhelming effect. Perhaps the play itself does not integrate these elements sufficiently, making for marvellous scenes but not an entirely satisfactory whole.