True West

by Sam Shepard

seen at the Vaudeville Theatre on 17 December 2018

Matthew Dunster directs Kit Harington as Austin and Johnny Flynn as Lee with Donald Sage Mackay as Saul Kimmer (Austin's agent) and Madeleine Potter as Austin and Lee's mother in this curious comedy noir play about the conflict between two brothers, which has been read as an embodiment of the inner conflicts of Sam Shepard himself.

Austin is looking after his mother's house (she is visiting Alaska), and trying to complete a screenplay to seal a deal with his agent. But his tearaway brother Lee turns up, disturbing his equanimity. Where Austin appears focused and in control, Lee is a freer spirit, evidently feckless and untroubled by low-level criminal activity. Fraternal tension is only exacerbated by these temperamental differences.

When Lee begins to encroach on Austin's territory, pitching a 'Wild West' story to agent Saul Kimmer, sparks really begin to fly as Saul is all too obviously transferring his attention from one brother to the other. Austin in turn becomes increasingly unhinged while Lee appears to know exactly what he is doing and how to go about it.

The play appears to be realistic to begin with - the set, designed by Jon Bausor, is an extremely detailed evocation of a cluttered house; though perhaps we should be warned by the false perspectives that all is not as it seems. As the arguments between the brothers develop, however, the situations become more bizarre, until Austin is obsessively buttering mountains of toast prepared from all the toasters he has stolen (to prove that he can shine at his brother's business), and the house is trashed by the ranting brothers. When their mother returns, her reactions are deadpan (and therefore very funny); but there is something odd about her misunderstanding about 'Picasso visiting the local museum', the reason she claims to have come home early. Clearly she is literal-minded - her sons cannot make her understand that Picasso is dead; but the joke doesn't really go anywhere.

The performances gathered strength as the play's energies become more unpredictable. The opening scenes between the two brothers were at times a little pedestrian, but their arguments in the second half achieved real comic force, with Kit Harington managing almost paralytic drunkenness just as convincingly as the complete determination to get on with toast-buttering. Johnny Flynn, meanwhile, shifted through the moods of his character with equal ease; cleverly, Shepard allows Lee to become focused on producing a screenplay, but keeps him from having any skill with writing even when he tries to put his mind to it. 

It's a bit of a hybrid play, with an ambivalent ending, but it was an entertaining evening and a pleasure to watch the two young men chewing the furniture - or at least manically destroying it - a task that actually requires considerable skill with comic timing and carefully choreographed interaction.