The Australian Edition 1FRI 26 APR 2002, Page 013 Brothers at war deserted by reason By Martin Ball Theatre True West By Sam Shepard. Melbourne Theatre Company. The Fairfax, Victorian Arts Centre, ends June 1. Tickets $32-$45. Bookings through Ticketmaster7: 1300136166. AMERICAN poet Robert Frost once wrote: ``They cannot scare me with their empty spaces ... I have it in me so much nearer home/To scare myself with my own desert places.'' It's easy to hear echoes of Frost's lines in Sam Shepard's 1980 play True West, where Shepard uses the desert as a physical otherness and as a metaphor for the empty space within ourselves where we fear to go. True West belongs to a tradition of American theatre that attacks the hollowness of the American dream. Behind the brilliant facade of prosperity and domestic happiness, Shepard shows us another sort of typical family: the father is alcoholic and absent, the mother is disengaged from reality, and the two boys play out a sibling rivalry that verges from boisterous to vicious. As the play opens, Austin (David Tredinnick) has returned to the suburban family home to finish a film script. When Austin has a meeting to sell his romantic screenplay to Hollywood producer Saul (Ross Williams), his elder brother Lee (David Wenham) muscles in with his own inchoate story about two men riding into the desert. The brothers' rivalry quickly descends into anarchy, involving a rather too neat role reversal. Lee tries to appropriate Austin's literary ability, while Austin envies his brother's elemental oneness with the desert. Their contest and struggle is played out across the keys of Austin's typewriter. It functions first as an index to Austin's literary mastery over his brother, and later as a symbol of his fall as Lee progressively takes over the machine and finally destroys it with a golf club. It is clear that a typewriter offers here a physical poetics that could never be achieved by a laptop computer. In the last 10 minutes of the play the boys' mother (Julia Blake) turns up unexpectedly. But mom is no deus ex machina come to administer moral judgment and her arrival is simply a catalyst for complete disintegration. Wenham gives a forceful portrayal of Lee, the morose drifter who drinks beer and raw eggs for breakfast. He fleshes out the character with brutal mannerisms of voice and physique. Tredinnick's Austin begins as fastidious and urbane, becoming more desperate and psychotic the deeper he looks into himself. Director Malcolm Keith Kay describes his production for the Melbourne Theatre Company as ``courageous''. Recognising that the theme of the American West has less relevance for an Australian audience, the production is stripped bare to concentrate on the psychological landscape. It puts enormous pressure on the text, which does not always sustain such intensity. But the direction is strong and the ideas are focused to a sharp edge. Dale Ferguson's bold design is an essential component in this reading. The whole stage becomes a sandpit, simultaneously conjuring boyhood games and the image of the desert, the liminal zone where the psyche is scarified by truth. A backdrop horizon of red, yellow and black gestures to an Australian setting. Iain Grandage's wonderful music is a pastiche of styles, from country to blues to the desert guitar beloved of western film scores. During the past few seasons MTC has revisited some icons of American drama, with classic plays by Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and now Shepard. Perhaps we can look forward to a similar retrospective of Australian national drama in the near future. Caption: Siblings turn psycho: Wenham, left, and Tredinnick Illus: Photo Column: Preview Section: FEATURES Type: Review >