True West

If you want to know where the Coen brothers cribbed their all best moves from, look no further than Glasgow Citizens Theatre’s robust revival of Sam Shepard’s 1980 play, ‘True West’, which transfers across the border to open the Tricycle’s autumn season.

The first half of Philip Breen’s production is sublimely atmospheric stuff. Somewhere in California, nerdy screenwriter Austin (Eugene O’Hare) is housesitting for his mother, who is holidaying in Alaska. Unfortunately for him, his disreputable brother Lee – a magnificently dissolute Alex Ferns – has just emerged from five years holed up in the Mojave desert and is determined to make a nuisance of himself. Austin is trying to finish up a story outline on his rickety typewriter. Lee is chugging menacingly through a six-pack and asking inane questions in a voice that’s half wheedle, half threat. The next day, Austin lends Lee his car to get him out of the house when big-shot producer Saul (an amusing, oily Steven Elliot) is visiting. Unfortunately the pair’s paths do cross, just as Saul is about to leave and Lee is stumbling in with a stolen telly. One thing leads to another and before Austin quite understands what’s going on, Lee has hustled Saul into buying his idea for a western, on the proviso that his brother is the one to write it.

There is a brooding, Pinter-esque danger to this first half, a slow, dark tug-o-war between the brothers, a glacially-paced struggle for dominance, replete with absurdist menace. But the sense of escalating danger has to go somewhere, and the second half felt a bit excessive as things finally simmer over between the brothers during a drunken writing session during which the house is comprehensively trashed. It’s all there in Shepard’s text, but Breen’s sudden and total cranking of the accelerator lost me a bit, a deliberate lack of modulation as he pitches the show from atmospheric black comedy to something teeteringly close to farce. It has to be said that Ferns is magnificently compelling in this section as the now ragingly out of control Lee. But amidst all the sound and the fury, I found my interest in ‘True West’s story heading slightly south.