WHEN Sam Shepard directed his Fool for Love, which involved incestuous passion, he kept pushing his actors to raise the emotional stakes: “Take it further, take it further.” One imagines he did the same when Sean Penn and Nick Nolte played two brothers wrangling beside their father’s corpse in his production of The Late Henry Moss in 2000.
Rage more vehemently, kick him harder, keep those eyes bulging!
Certainly, Andrew Lincoln and Brendan Coyle rage, kick and bulge to pretty unBritish effect in the European premiere that Michael Attenborough is staging in N1. And, though the result can seem repetitively febrile, that’s as it should be. After all, we’re in trademark Shepard territory: the far West, a preposterously tacky room, a disintegrating bed containing the days-old body of the father who beat his wife, terrorised his sons and drank himself to death.
Given Shepard’s obsession with families much like his own — loveless, boozy, angry, bewildered, dysfunctional (with all the dys and little of the fun) — it’s unsurprising that one feels a sense of déjà vu. Yet the piece sustains its tension, partly because of some strong acting, partly because Ray thinks Earl knows more about this death than he’s telling and is determined to sleuth out the truth.
He’s right, too: which produces a denouement that’s less melodramatic than the play’s overwrought style leads one to fear, but also comes with a mysticism that is oddly out of place.
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Before that we get flashbacks in abundance. Now Trevor Cooper’s coarse, roly-poly Henry is drunkenly cavorting with Flaminia Cinque as his slatternly doxy or venomously sneering at Simon Gregor as his helpful, put-upon Mexican neighbour. Now his sons, long estranged and with mutual grievances galore, are at each other’s throats and psyches. But as with Buried Child and Shepard’s other family plays, grisly humour is never far away. The impoverished hamlet where Henry lived — Bonkers, New Mexico? — is a place only connoisseurs of destructive eccentricity should visit. The funniest episode has Lincoln’s Ray ferociously quizzing Jason Watkins as the tiny, ingratiating cabbie who took Henry on his last ride: a killer-harpoonist with a squirming shrimp in his sights.
Yes, it’s all very Shepard, up to the moment when Cooper’s blundering, brutal Henry — an ex-airman, like the dramatist’s father — excuses his ugliness with a yell of: “I’ve saved my country, I’ve dropped bombs on strangers.”
Funny or awful? Both.
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