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Sam Shepard: Another summer of Sam

The rugged cowboy chic and studied coolness of Sam Shepard's atmospheric dramas hold an irresistible allure for both actors and directors. But how successfully do they work for the audience?

Jonathan Myerson
Wednesday 25 July 2001 00:00 BST
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I picture a fuggy university studio theatre in 1979, the annual showcase competition: 45-minute plays directed by first years determined to make their mark in the Drama Society. The room is packed with eager students, cheering their chosen casts, laughing too hard at Funny Acting, looking self-consciously intense at over-wrought Serious Acting.

But the whole room is brought to an unswerving halt when one character suddenly produces a fish from a bucket and then slowly, methodically guts it. Yes, really guts it. There's no faking here, the room's too small; the large floppy fish is slit open and the red, spaghetti insides removed, the head chopped off, the bones filleted. I reach for my running order: it is a play called Action by Sam Shepard. From that day, my sense of Shepard was born.

A year or so later, I remember Bob Hoskins and Anthony Sher slugging it out in the Cottesloe for the control of a typewriter. Did it get smashed? For some reason I remember a golf club slamming into the keys, but maybe I'm making that bit up. I certainly remember Patricia Hayes as their maternal referee. It was a play called True West.

And then I remember Ian Charleson and Julie Walters, also at the National in the mid-Eighties, slugging it out... for what? I think it was control of their own love for each other, but I'm not entirely sure. Again, bourbon bottles, rocking chairs, a whole lot of desert and trailer-trash atmosphere, but what was it about? That was Fool for Love.

There's no doubting that the man can create crispy-crunchy theatre moments. But what else of true substance do I remember? And the answer is little, precious little. Isn't there something about Sam Shepard's plays that is dangerously slippery, cool and on-the-bone maybe, but still irritatingly indefinable? Genuinely, deliberately indefinable?

It's easy to suspect that he doesn't want us to take anything from his writing that's too tangible – that he wants us all to just wing it. A recent short story of his, ingenuously called Winging It, describes a movie actor's dilemma as he tries to find the right way to react when he enters a hut and finds his suicidal friend hanging there (just as Shepard himself actually does in the film Voyager). Unable to think of the right reaction, the actor decides to wait for the call of "Action!" and simply wing it. So he walks into the shack and finds himself turning on the radio that sits on the table below the slowly rotating body. The director immediately jumps up and declares that he loves impulses, and by take six the actor is walking in and smashing the radio to smithereens. And by that stage, the director is ecstatic.

And how audiences have fallen willingly in love with Shepard's seductive impulsiveness over his 40-year playwriting career. Why's that man filleting that fish? Don't ask, just wing it. In fact, come to think of it, where did that fish come from? Wing it. Why are these four people all eating roast turkey when there seems to be little else to eat or drink? Enough with the questions, just feel the drama.

On this kind of spontaneous sense of cool Shepard made his name, writing plays for the off-off-Broadway plays of the Sixties. He was the perfect Dylanesque figure for the now-legendary companies like La MaMa and Caffe Cino: shockingly handsome with floppy, dirty-blond hair, as shy and winsome as an unbroken colt. But for all the sexy cowboy shyness, there seem to be nerves of steel beneath: hasn't he always known exactly what he wanted?

Skimming now through my Faber edition of his early plays, the strikingly repeated motif is how wrong the directors feel they were when faced with this man's work or personality. Ralph Cook, the director of Chicago admits that "in every argument I have ever had with him, Sam has always been right. He has an instinctive sense of what is theatrically right for his plays that goes beyond rules and preconceptions." Michael Smith directed the 1965 premiere of Icarus's Mother: "It is terribly difficult to produce. I failed. I started rehearsals talking about its content and overall meaning. Trouble." Sydney Schubert Walter was landed with the premier of Fourteen Hundred Thousand at the Firehouse Theater, Minneapolis: "When Mr Shepard arrived and rehearsals began, I discovered that all these ideas were unacceptable to him. I felt that if Mr Shepard's ideas for production were followed through, the result would be untheatrical. He felt that my ideas subverted the play's intention."

And so it goes on – and that's in just a single volume of five plays. If there's one lesson to be drawn: few work with Mr Shepard twice. No, actually there's another lesson: if you want to build yourself a big reputation, a bit of iconic status, be difficult, be unmanageable, always stick to your Colt 45s. Shepard seems to have managed this throughout his career, at the same time contradicting every image we have of him. A recluse (apparently) who has acted in countless Hollywood movies and TV mini-series. A real, gritty, on-the-ranch cowboy who has mostly lived in New York, London and now Virginia. He was once associated with Patti Smith, the dangerous, punkish singer, but now it's Jessica Lange, the Hollywood star. But then again, what does any of that matter? It's the soul of the wild, untamed West that counts for his audiences and for many, he seems to hold the patent on that. By the mid-Sixties, the days of Soldier Blue, everyone knew that the old fringed-pants-and-lasso image was dead. A cowboy could no longer be the gunslinger who knew that the only good Indian was a... you weren't even allowed to call them Indians any more. But that doesn't mean that there weren't plenty of (mostly urban) Americans who wanted to find new ways of discovering themselves in the wildness of the West.

Enter tall, rangy cowboy types who grew up on farms 40 miles east of LA. Shepard's first play was actually called Cowboys and one of his greatest successes is True West, which charts the battle between Lee, a Hollywood scriptwriter and Austin, his drifting cowboyish brother. In the struggle to successfully pitch to the producer – Austin's cliché cowboy story or Lee's love story – the outcome is inevitable.

And then there's Harry Dean Stanton staggering across the cactus plains of Paris, Texas, one of Shepard's more memorably undramatic screenplays. Or there's Chuck Yeager, played by Shepard in The Right Stuff, a test-pilot pushing the envelope of jet flight – taming the untamable, as the white man did in the Wild West of old. And being totally laconic and straw-chewing with it.

If there's one quality that all Shepard's characters seem to embody, it's this refusal to accept the rules of ordinary life, the constraints of domestic civility. Even Shooter, our fish gutter, breaks off from the meal to periodically smash chairs to splinters (the same rules apply: don't ask why.)

But apart from the cowboy spirit, who are Shepard's characters? I remember moments, I remember coups de théâtre, but I don't remember true All My Sons/"kindness of strangers"/"could have been a contender"-type dilemmas. Is this why he is so unnervingly unmemorable? Michael Smith complains that when he first read Icarus's Mother he " couldn't tell the characters apart". Once into rehearsals, he admits: "Tardily, we got to work on character. It turned out that the characters are perfectly distinct, it's just that we're given almost no information about them." Can this ever be the basis of a good play?

Shepard himself is happy to admit: "I preferred a character that was constantly unidentifiable, shifting through the actor, so that the actor could almost play anything, and the audience was never expected to identify with the character."

All this makes the plays immensely attractive to actors, and even more attractive to directors wanting to make their very own mark with a tasty revival. It almost certainly explains the current presence of two old Shepards in London studio theatres. But do audiences really want these super-cool, style-as-drama moments? You can make up your own minds, but see how much you remember after a fortnight, a month, and then decide. And it needs to be more than a whiff of Billingsgate.

Sam Shepard's 'Action' opens at the Young Vic Studio tonight (020-7928 6363); 'A Lie of the Mind' is at the Donmar Warehouse to 1 Sept (020-7369 1732)

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