Theatre: Brothers at Arms

An American classic gets a vigorous staging at the Peacock, but doesn't quite ring true for Colin MurphyA lanky, filthy, unshaven man stands at a table in the conservatory, relentlessly bringing a golf club down on a typewriter. A stockier, neater type is slumped against the fridge necking a bottle of liquor. The contents of the kitchen cupboards are strewn across the floor, and a line of maybe a dozen toasters sits along the counter top.
The scene is violent, funny and mildly unsettling. In Jimmy Fay's production at the Peacock theatre, designed by Ferdia Murphy, it is convincingly set and staged. Declan Conlon as the taller, older of the men, Lee, is relentlessly malevolent, a petty thief and hobo who has insinuated himself into the other's home and set about destroying it. Aidan Kelly as the younger, Austin, the straight man, is edgy and insecure, even while apparently more successful and composed. The men are brothers, and the play, True West, is about the mutually destructive, yet interdependent, rhythms of their relationship. The destruction is well caught in Jimmy Fay's production: the actors are carefully coached in the mechanics of their elaborate fight scenes, and the stage is authentically trashed, provoking both gasps and laughs from the audience. But the interdependency isn't there, and it is on this that the play hangs.
The play is ostensibly about the great frontier myths of America – those of the Wild West, and Hollywood. The younger, studious brother, Austin, is a working screenwriter, developing a script while staying at their mother's house in LA, and cultivating a big-time producer. Lee arrives unannounced to crash with him, full of tales of adventures in the desert, and insinuates himself with Austin's producer, successfully pitching him a Western story.
There is no “true” West in this: the authenticity that they both seek – in art and in rootlessness – evades them. Everything around them is corrupt – the Los Angeles suburbs of their mother's house, the crude machinations of Hollywood, and the actual desert, where their father has drunk himself nearly to death.
Haunted by this legacy, the brothers are also haunted by each other: they play is about the dysfunctionality of family, and also about the “split” self: “I just wanted to give a taste of what it feels like to be two-sided... I think we're split in a much more devastating way than psychology can ever reveal,” Sam Shepard said in an interview at the time of the first production in 1980.
Declan Conlon and Aidan Kelly handle Sam Shepard's rolling, battling dialogue well, relishing in its cadences, and the script beautifully captures the sense of a world lost, an idealised West sought and dreamed of, but evasive. The set, though, in the Peacock's newly reconfigured auditorium with the stage in the centre and seating on three sides, can't reflect this – it feels claustrophobic and too intimate for a play that seems to long for some wide open space.
And the sheerness, the rawness of the brothers' relationship is missing: the actors have so much to concentrate on, between the swinging golf clubs, popping toasters, carefully-massaged accents and up-front audience that there is little room left for intimacy or vulnerability.
Absent this, and the play is stuck as something of a period piece: an absurdist answer to Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, where the characters respond to similar trends – the dissolution of American society and the defeat of traditional values by emergent consumerism – not with heroism or tragedy, but with comic-book violence. Where Death of a Salesman ends with a climactic act of violence that enshrines the tragedy of the small man in America, True West ends jarringly in the middle of a fight: either one might kill the other, and it doesn't really matter which, but more likely they'll just keep on fighting.
Viewed in that context, the piece is dramatically interesting, and in Jimmy Fay's energetic production, it's certainly entertaining. But the play has the capacity to be moving, and the production falls short on this. The dark humour never really descends into bleakness, and the violence remains more physical than emotional. It's the mutual dependency in the brothers' relationship that lends the play its universality, and lifts it out of the narrow confines of its genre and “modern classic” status, and Declan Conlon and Aidan Kelly's double act quite capture it.