FOOL FOR LOVE.
London
FOOL FOR LOVE
by Sam Shepard
Apollo Theatre
Mon-Sat 8pm Mat Thu & Sat 3pm
Runs 1hr 20min No interval
TICKETS: 0870 890 1101
Review: Timothy Ramsden 21 June
Full-force central performances in a high-voltage revival.
Chekhov said producing a gun in act 1 meant an obligation to fire it in act 3. But Sam Shepard’s play has only one act, and when the most threatening character re-enters with a rifle it’s only to clean it. He also has a nifty way with a lasso, but is just keeping up with young cowhands who can rope a steer in 6 seconds flat. This mismatch between the expected and actual uses of gun and rope indicates the central characters’ violent, dissatisfied world.
While Mamet’s characters tussle in tooth-edged verbal fragments, Shepard’s flash operatic broadswords at each other, swathes of language that assault and plead. Ordinary people become heroic in struggling with their hopes and feelings, while the nearest to villains in Fool for Love are a vengeful offstage woman and the possum-calm old man seated in a corner.
He’s father to May and Eddie, by different women, and is the memory spurring Eddie’s anger. Brother and sister fell in love without knowing their relationship. The play shows the outcome of this passion, as doomed as if written in Athens 2500 years ago with the appropriate Greek goddess dropping in, in judgement.
Eddie’s travelled over 2000 miles, compelled to see the sister who’s trying to escape him. In a rundown motel (starkly dilapidated in Bunny Christie’s set) she’s awaiting a date with Joe Duttine’s shamblingly inoffensive Martin, a groundsman unable to smooth this patch of emotionally rough terrain.
His mildness is what May want instead of the incestuous hothouse passion to which their father’s grizzled spirit urges Eddie. The play slugs through the present, then versions of the past lying behind it, all blazing full-force in Lindsay Posner’s production.
From the opening where Eddie lashes out with his tongue, or there’s a fraction of a delay in his combative “Fine” to May, revealing the divided mind; where May sits on the end of her bed, head-down, hair covering her face, before she’s up kneeing him in the groin, the play runs like a giant sore being gashed open, before the final calm moment of knowledge and separation.
May: Juliette Lewis
Eddie: Martin Henderson
Old Man: Larry Lamb
Martin: Joe Duttine
Director: Lindsay Posner
Designer: Bunny Christie
Lighting: Mark Henderson
Sound: Fergus O’Hare
Voice/Dialect coach: Majella Hurley
Fight director: Terry King
Lasso instructor: Alex Laredo
2006-06-22 16:03:24