Review: True West at Ensemble Theatre

Review by Alison Stoddart

Iain Sinclair brought to bear all his theatre directing skills at the opening night of True West, now running at the Ensemble Theatre. The result was triumphant muscular performance of Sam Shepard’s blistering Pulitzer winning California comedy drama.  Simon Maiden gave his all and more in the role of Lee opposite a transformational Darcy Kent as Austin. Effectively a two-hander, the play adds James Lugton in very textured support and Vanessa Downing who makes the most of her late appearance in a clarifying role. An invigorating night of craft that remains timely. 

Shepard’s 1981 play surfaces the violence between two brothers trying to maintain a fraying sibling relationship. Darcy Kent plays Austin, trying to make it as a screenwriter in Hollywood. Austin is holed up in his mother’s home on the edge of the southern California desert writing a screenplay he is contracted to deliver to Saul (James Lugton’s lugubrious and very funny movie producer). Before that can happen, Simon Maiden explodes into his idyll as his brother Lee, who we come to discover is a drifter and petty thief. 

Lee is a wild, disruptive force, who decides to pitch his own story idea to Saul when he arrives. Lee forms an unlikely rapport with Saul and usurps his brothers’ careful plans. Austin loses the upper hand over his brother and abdicates control over his writing as Lee rampages around the house, their sibling rivalry building into chaotic violence. 

Shepard’s play explores family dysfunction, as well themes of writing about something as opposed to writing of experience. It also explores the creative act of writing and the subsequent loss of confidence in their skills that all writers experience at some stage. The play shows how ambition and resentment pull at even brotherly relationships. 

Such a strong play needs a strong cast. The two main roles of Lee and Austin carry the emotional focus, but in this performance the other two actors playing Mother and Saul bring considerable weight. Downing’s portrayal of Mother is decisive: although very late on stage in person, Downing exposes a balance between authority, and the absence she has been in the brothers’ lives. On the other side of the brother’s central tension, James Lugton sparks as Saul, delivering witty retorts and laugh out loud emotional jabs.  

The four actors go at each other in a naturalistic set delivered by Simone Romaniuk. The audience can sense the endless suburbia and the incipient desert just beyond the windows, often lit by a low morning or scorching evening sun thanks to Brockman’s effective lighting. Daryl Wallis’s sound design stands out, fulfilling a tricky requirement of constant crickets as well as still of night calm. It all adds to a compelling authenticity, especially with the destruction the staging has to endure as the brothers go at each other during the drunken night.  

At just 95 minutes with no interval, this True West delivers an intense experience that is sometimes undercut with great humour. Maiden and Kent are fascinating to watch as they hurtle toward the expected breakdown. But the direction always maintains control, Sinclair provides moments of breathing room. But it is a production that rarely lets up, bringing laughter, absurdity and social commentary to a growing unease about what the brothers’ grinding relationship is building towards.  

The enormous requirements of the characters of Austin and Lee are fully realised by Kent and Maiden, who project textured people with real emotion. It’s a powerful, instinctive production that displays Shepard’s theme of masculinity and his thoughts on the American myth. It’s memorable theatre, often loud, sometimes funny, brusque and physical, and well worth seeing.

Image Credit: Prudence Upton