KICKING A DEAD HORSE. To 20 September.
London.
KICKING A DEAD HORSE
by Sam Shepard.
Almeida Theatre Almeida Street N1 1TA To 20 September 2008.
Mon-Sat 7.30 Mat Sat 3pm.
Runs 1hr 10min No interval.
TICKETS 020 7359 4404 (24 hours).
www.almeida.co.uk
Review: Carole Woddis 12 September.
Horse-sense as the Wild West closes down.
When it comes to bringing the great American outdoors inside, Sam Shepard reigns supreme. Nobody has translated the taming of the Wild West and its iconic, mythic quality into theatrical terms with quite his verve in a theatre and film career spanning over 40 years in which he has written over 45 plays. I doubt though whether Kicking a Dead Horse will rate as one of his finest – though it may prove one of his most poignant.
How else to describe a play that seems to exude a valedictory sense and that hovers uncannily somewhere between Beckett and Brian Friel? Hardly surprising, therefore, that its single character, Manhattan art-dealer Hobart Struther, should be played by Stephen Rea in this Abbey Theatre Dublin production, arriving after a run at New York’s Public Theater.
Rea, hardly your most likely fallen cowboy material, carries a hangdog quality more akin to a refugee from Friel’s Faith Healer, or a lost Beckettian soul searching for meaning in a hostile world confronted by the eternal void. Kicking a Dead Horse even contains a coffin-like hole in the ground, out of which Struther initially appears and into which he returns with - typical Shepard - his dead horse, which he has been trying unsucessfully to bury, on top of him. Struther, seeking one last moment of `authenticity’ in the Great American outdoors, has been determined to bury this final companion who has died on him.
The corpse of this great beast, Struther’s violent reaction to him and his inability to bury him forms the striking if troubling central image of Shepard’s meditation, with its reflections on personal failings, ageing and dying, against the boom of doomsday, a horizon of Arizonian purplish hills, a carping alter ego and a sudden, silent, momentary appearance of a woman.
At once ironic, rueful and surreal, Shepard (directing his own production) fashions sufficient mood changes and the piece overall carries an appealingly enigmatic quality about it. Yet it is less involving than you might hope, with Rea’s performance impressive but cold. It’s a theatrical metaphor that, for once, in Shepard’s hands remains dramatically inhospitable.
Hobart Struther: Stephen Rea.
Young Woman: Joanne Crawford.
Director: Sam Shepard.
Designer: Brian Vahey.
Lighting: John Comiskey.
Costume: Joan Bergin.
Voice director: Andrea Ainsworth.
Dialect coach: Brendan Gunn.
Hair and Make-up: Patsy Giles.
Assistant director: Wayne Jordan.
Horse Makers:
Sculptors: Padraig McGoran, John O’Connor.
Mechanism: Shadow Creations.
Assistants: Tony Doody, Rory Doyle.
Model maker: Make McDuff.
2008-09-13 01:18:32