GUEST REVIEWER LUKE JONES WATCHES A GOOD IDEA STUMBLE AWAY INTO THE DESERT
This is a drunk play. It rambles a great tale at you, mildly hooks you, then fluffs the end as it totters off for another tipple. We’re promised a great modern classic from Sam Shepard but the result is uneven, strange but interestingly cinematic. Our view is a widescreen picture of a house in LA. The kitchen is perfectly even, the plants scream 70s from the far wall and the sky is piercing blue. The designer Max Jones has built a creepily smooth Stepford house; the kind you can easily picture yourself having a breakdown in.
The play, however, has no such vision; no coherence. Austin is a successful screenwriter with an all-American face and bright blue shirts. He is house sitting for his mother. His rough-looking brother, with muddy hands and an unwashed t-shirt with many tales to tell, has arrived unannounced. Austin has a screenplay to write, but, uh-oh, Lee has an idea. An idea from the desert, no less. This sets us off nicely. The dialogue is hit and miss, a little self-absorbed, but with enough shine to make it promising. A suitable but not particularly exciting turn comes from Steven Elliot (as a ‘moooovie’ producer with cash to splash) who appears to get Lee’s idea rolling. An outline is written, the brothers clash; it is thoroughly usual but is lifted by good humour and nice outbursts from Alex Ferns as Lee. There is nothing more intriguing than the mentally unstable and Alex starts with this well.
Its biggest crime at this stage is simply self indulgence. It rambles, stagey arguments bubble from nowhere, and this Tricycle audience gasps with horror at snide remarks about producers, and roars at jokes about agents’ fees. This is the best, I thought, that a play about screenwriting could do. Until it twists. It is as if Sam Shepard, or the director Phillip Breen (who draws some nice tense moments in the first half) utterly lose faith in the will-they-won’t-they ‘brothers who work together’ dynamic. It flips into a horrible dream; the lights are cranked up, the performances are strained and the script melts into nonsense about stealing toasters and whether the desert would be a suitable home. All of the tepid momentum about their father, different upbringings and contrasting lifestyles (which we attentively waded through with the promise of a payoff) is cast aside in favour of getting the brothers pissed and trashing the mum’s house. The cinematic style, tense edge and average humour are lost. Eugene O’Hare becomes absolutely cartoonish, Alex Ferns ditches all character in favour of the obscene and the script droops lower and lower until the excruciatingly obvious return of the mother. An interesting premise bottled.
– LUKE JONES
Rating: Two Mice 
Playing at the Tricycle Theatre until 4th October
Box Office: 020 7328 1000
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