True West
by Sam Shepard
Flying Penguin Productions
The Studio, Holden Street Theatres, Hindmarsh, Adelaide.
May 2 . Tickets $18 – $28.
Bookings BASS 131 246 or Venuetix 8255 8888
Until May 16.

Increasingly, it seems, professional theatre in Adelaide is looking to the efforts of dedicated individuals. With only the flagship State Theatre Company and a small and under-resourced scattering of second-tier outfits, the city has always depended on the kindness of free-lances. Significant among them has been David Mealor’s Flying Penguin Productions. Over the past four years he has been responsible for a succession of high calibre stagings of contemporary classics – including Brian Friels’ Translations, Pinter’s The Birthday Party and an ambitious production of Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins.

Opening at Holden Street Theatres is Mealor’s latest – Sam Shepard’s 1980 masterwork, True West, a darkly funny, corrosive study of two brothers. Austin, an aspiring screenwriter is trying to finish his breakthrough script in their mother’s house in suburban LA when he is visited by his shiftless, criminally psychopathic brother, Lee – back from the Mojave Desert. Shepard described True West as a play about “double nature” and, as the two brothers claw at each other to take possession of a screenplay contract, all manner of dualities emerge. In what has been called Shepard’s allegorical realism, everything is bifurcate – art and business, civility and violence, West Coast and True West, there are even grim echoes of Cain and Abel.

Prowling each other in Kathryn Sproul’s intricately detailed seventies-style kitchen design(expansively lit by Mark Pennington) the two brothers are exposed in their primitive need to be accepted by each other, their absent cruel father, and the urban society that has no time for losers and runts. The opening scene, prefaced by bursts of dueling banjo and mandolin and later, (also from composer/performers, Cameron and Tristan Goodall) implosions of Ry Cooder-style electric guitar, establishes the ever-brooding sibling animosity.

Renato Musolino’s Austin, in beige slacks and earnest spectacles, is all fuming restraint as he attempts to resist Nick Garsden as Lee, teasing and probing with flicks and punches, both verbal, and actual, as they niggle each other ever further towards the convulsive struggle of the final scene.

The performances are excellent. Garsden’s Lee manipulates and hustles the big-time producer Saul (another well-observed cameo from Geoff Revell) but he mixes a wounded vulnerability in with the malice. And as Austin, Musolino’s ride towards chaos and breakout, manically harvesting toast from sixteen stolen toasters while drunkenly proclaiming his escape plan, is outstandingly handled. As the mother, exempting herself from her murderous whelps, Chrissie Page also contributes strongly to the sardonic and disturbing poise of David Mealor’s meticulous production.

Murray Bramwell

“Brothers and other strangers”, The Australian, May 4, 2009, p.30.