In Sam Shepard’s searing 1980 play about sibling rivalry ‘True West’, early thirties screenwriter Austin has taken time away from his wife and kids and the family home in northern California, and is house-minding his mother’s home 40 miles east of Los Angeles, whilst she goes for a trip around Alaska.
Austin is using his time at his mum’s to complete a screenplay that he’s been working on for months. His writing sanctuary is broken when his older unemployed drifter brother Lee turns up unannounced and resolved to both crash there for a while and to pick fights with him. It isn’t long before their mum’s home transforms from being a sanctuary to a war zone!
The great American actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, in his second directing gig for the Sydney Theatre Company, delivers Sydney audiences the full ‘True West’ experience. Hoffman’s intimate knowledge of the play, he starred, along with John C Reilly, in the plays’ critically acclaimed Broadway production back in 2000, comes through in his inspired direction.
Hoffman concentrates the actor’s and the audience’s energy on the competitiveness and one-upmanship that takes place between the two brothers. Austin starts off as the great screenwriter, then Lee decides that he can be a great writer too. Lee is a master thief, always bringing home some new prize. Then what do we get, Austin comes home with a batch of toasters that he has just burgled.
Hoffman and his wonderful leads, Wayne Blair as Lee and Brendan Cowell as Austin, play their scenes for their rich humour that can be found within them.
Alan Dukes as film producer Saul Kimmer who is targeted by Lee, and Heather Mitchell as the mother, who comes home to find her place trashed by her two sons, provide good support to the leads.
The cast perform in Richard Roberts’s compact set of an eighties kitchen and living room which also featured an alcove for some of mum’s favourite ferns.
The play runs at a feverish pace for an hour and forty without interval and plays over nine scenes, with scene changes taking place between all the scenes. Max Lyandvert’s powerful music score and Paul Jackson’s incisive lighting tie in well with these changes.
The Sydney Theatre Company’s production of ‘True West’ opened at Wharf 1 on Tuesday 2nd November and runs until Saturday 18th December, 2010.