Spine-tingling drama and acting that's as good as it gets
Author: Helen Thomson
Date: 26/04/2002
Words: 611
           Publication: The Age
Section: The Culture
Page: 4


Sam Shepard's plays present challenges to both actors and audiences since
they record the collapse of American notions of national heroism and the
decay of the American dreams, without recourse to the conventional means
of storytelling and character development. It is both myth itself and the
fictional vehicles of myth - the odyssey, the journey, the quest, the
story - that are deconstructed in his plays.
Designer Dale Ferguson has come up with a symbolic set that is both a
sandy-floored desert and a kitchen. The two brothers, Austin (David
Tredinnick) and Lee (David Wenham), represent respectively the
domesticated and the feral American. They are significantly situated in
Shepard's birth place of Texas, while mum explores America's northern
boundaries in Alaska, and dad is washed up somewhere near Mexico.

The true west of America, according to Shepard, is very different to the
cowboy glamorisation made popular by cinema. Nor is it any longer the wild
frontier representing the possibility of escape from problems of the east.

By 1980, when True West was written, it was merely the dead-end,
spiritually empty place where people found themselves stranded when they
thought they were going somewhere else.

Hollywood beckons, siren-like, in the distance, and film producer Saul
Kimmer (Ross Williams) seems to offer the chance of money and fame to
Austin, writing a screenplay. When Lee, wild, anarchic desert dweller,
seduces Saul with a cliched story of his own, the sibling rivalry between
the two brothers boils over.

It is this rivalry that is the play's real subject. Shepard charts a
psychological landscape that has its beginning when Lee, trailing danger,
incipient violence and moody aggression, swaggers into the family home
where Lee housesits during his mother's Alaskan holiday.

It is Austin's more civilised background that makes dealing with Lee so
difficult, but it also seems a character weakness makes him fear his
violent older brother.

Ancient rivalries soon emerge, centred on possession of Austin's car,
significantly the only means of escape, however temporary, from the deadly
emptiness of this family home.

But more significantly, the rivalry shifts to the ownership of story, a
less tangible but more potent form of power.

Austin's love story is swept away by Lee's well-worn narrative of a desert
chase, a ``bullshit" story according to Austin, ``Two lame brains chasing
each other across Texas!"

Yet, Austin is finally himself captured by the myth of the desert, a place
where life can become meaningful again, he thinks.

David Tredinnick gives a fine performance as Austin, but it is David
Wenham's night. His portrayal of Lee is about as good as acting gets. From
the moment he appears, the tension builds, suspense grows - we cannot take
our eyes off him. He creates a complex character whose disregard of
consequence, freedom from social constraint and suppressed rage that
erupts without warning, makes us fear him much as his brother does.

Austin makes the mistake of romanticising this character, but it is part
of Wenham's triumph to reveal that beneath the sound and fury of Lee lies
as tragic an emptiness as found in the true west of America's deserts.

This is a Cain and Abel story without Christian consolation. It is also an
American dream exploded with the violence that tragically seems to define
American character itself.

The first-class acting, the tight, unsentimental direction from Malcolm
Keith Kay, makes True West a spine-tingling night at the theatre.