Review Buried Child

Hidden family and state-of-the-nation secrets combine in Sam Shepherd's American Gothic comico-tragedy to give Francis Beckett a thrilling and disturbing evening.

Buried Child
by Sam Shepard

Secrets And Lies
http://www.atgtickets.com/shows/buried-child/trafalgar-studios/

Buried Child is a powerful play by Sam Shepard, an American theatre writer who knows his business, and director Scott Elliott gives it a production at the Trafalgar Studios that plays to its strengths, together with an almost perfect cast.

First produced in 1979 and set in Illinois, the state of Shepard's birth, the play is being sold as a political commentary on the seventies in the USA, but is just as relevant about the dark heart of middle America, as it was then and is now.

It's a long play - three acts, two intervals - with a transfixing first act, establishing the loneliness and nastiness of life on a failing farm in the middle of the vast American continent, confined in the small living room of husband and wife, Dodge and Haile. The play never leaves the room and Dodge, unable to walk, cannot even leave the sofa.

You have, right from the start, the claustrophobic feeling of being cooped up in that horrid, ugly room with the sick and dying old man, his brittle wife and his two sad and useless grown-up sons.

The second act offers us menace in that small space as the rain comes down in great sheets outside. A new person is in the room: a young woman from the city, Shelly, who cannot escape the two strange sons and their strange, crippled father.

In act three, the rain stops, and the young woman grows in confidence and forces the family to face its darkest secrets.

The play confronts us with a Middle America which has lost its soul and its humanity. The old man fights furiously over a blanket with one son, the son who has lost a leg, punching him viciously and repeatedly with all his failing strength. He fights over a bottle of whisky with the other son, who has lost his way, his nerve and perhaps his reason.

"You think just because people propagate they gotta love their offspring?" Dodge growls. It's not true among animals, he says, so why should we be different? And in that small room, the difference has indeed disappeared.

Yet even after the dreadful thing we learn of him in the play's last few minutes, we do not believe Dodge is entirely a bad old man. He is just lost amid the dust and poverty and misery and rain and hopelessness.

A fine cast is headed by Ed Harris (for whom Shepherd wrote Fool For Love) as Dodge. It's a wonderful, draining performance dominating the play, beginning to end, from the sofa except for the moments when he is on the floor.

Amy Madigan puts in a fine performance as his wife Haile, with only her piety to stand guard between her and the squalor around her. Barnaby Kay and Gary Shelford are convincing as the two sons, Bradley and Tilden.

Jeremy Irvine does the best an actor can do with Dodge's grandson Vince, hampered because the playwright's convenience requires Vince to behave in occasionally inconsistent ways. Jack Fortune makes the most of a nice cameo part as Haile's priest.

But apart from Ed Harris, the acting honours of the evening belong to Charlotte Hope as Shelly, turning slowly from dippy city girl to the strong catalyst who makes this dysfunctional family finally face what they have done to themselves and each other and what America has done to them.

The first two acts are marvellous. The third makes a few too many demands on our ability to suspend our disbelief - among other things, Vince has to go from roaring, fighting drunk to sober and reflective in a very few minutes. And the loose ends are not satisfactorily tied up.

But leave any awkwardnesses in the storytelling aside, for the end remains very troubling. For me it is not, despite the theatre's publicity, saying that Middle America was like this in the seventies. It is saying: This is Middle America, get over it.

The last few moments with Vince - I will not spoil it by telling you what they are - seem to imply Dodge will be replaced by someone just like him. The bestial patriarch's grandson will be the next patriarch.

In our current times, the play left me with a vision of the dark heart of Middle America. A great, grey soulless centre of a vast continent loathing the rest of the world, and even the rest of its own nation, filled with hopelessness and hate, which has now given us all a Donald Trump presidency, even though it knew in its heart that it had nothing to gain. A green light from me.

Review The Spoils

The Spoils
by Jesse Eisenberg

Jesse-In-A-Box
http://www.trafalgar-studios.com

There's something of a Jack-in-a-box quality to Ben (Jesse Eisenberg) the central character - it seems a bit much even to call him an anti-hero - in The Social Network star's sharply sour own comedy, 'The Spoils'.

Every time he appears knocked back, defeated, disoriented by too much pot smoking, his wizened, jeering face and wiry body pops up again to taunt those within his orbit.

Mind you, he can afford it. His apartment, prime real estate in the midst of New York, is gifted him by his wealthy Dad (no Mom  in sight) who subsidises Ben's lifestyle, passing as a documentary filmmaker, even after expulsion from film school.

Sharing the apartment, overlooking the Empire State Building, is Nepalese MBA student Kalyan (The Big Bang Theory's Kunal Nayyar), living rent free, already a published author of a book on how to bring economic reform to his country.

When Ben runs into soon-to-be married banker Ted (Alfie Allen, one of two superb British replacements for the original off-Broadway 2015 cast), an elementary school contemporary, the scene is set for a dinner party where Ben can exercise his fulsome repertoire of goading skills.

The meal is prepared by sweet-natured Kalyan who is also eager to gain an interview at Ted's prestigious Wall Street firm with his Indian medical intern girlfriend Reshma (Billions' Annapurna Sriram), whom Ben relishes needling, as one of the guests.

Completing an uncomfortable quintet is Ted's fiancée, teacher Sarah (Katie Brayben, the second excellent British cast member, recently seen in My Mother Said I Never Should) who was also a fellow elementary school pupil.

Ben focuses in on Sarah, aiming to break up her relationship with the seemingly amiable Ted while revealing to her a childhood obsession with her of a particularly grotesque scatalogical nature.

It's all terrifically well-acted with memorable characters in an affluent but precarious and savage world.

But in its sitcom-gone-sour mode, while the slick direction by Scott Elliott and performances are inherently theatrical, with the plot hanging on minutiae, this feels like a movie.

What to make of the subject matter?

Watch out for Ben's unexpected anecdotal flash of academic intelligence telling a joke based in US history. Alongside the title 'The Spoils' with its ancient Greek ring of winner-takes-all transmuted into 'To The Victor The Spoils' during a famously corrupt moment in American politics,  this may all give a clue.

There is also just a touch of novelist Philip Roth's character of Merry Levov, the dysfunctional fat rich privileged daughter turned anorexic terrorist (soon to be on screen in a movie version) in Ben.

And there's a double edge to the finale. Some may feel it a sentimental cop out but others may see a disturbing channelling of Ben's perverse energies by the banker and educator couple pitching him a cover (up) story as they put him back in his box.

For surely Ted's affable exterior is able to survive in the cut throat Wall Street environment of which we're given a glimpse through Kalyan's account of his interview when he finally wises up to reality outside academic exchange?

'The Spoils' is slick and powerful but can feel somehow incomplete as a stage production, so an amber/green light from TLT and her motorised theatregoing comrade-in-arms. But judge for yourself before the August 13 end of the run.