WINGED Horse deserve great credit for staging this production in the
face of grim funding problems. Without an Arts Council grant and with
knife-edge support from local authorities, the demand from venues for
Sam Shephard's four-hander from the contemporary American canon (which
has little enough presence on the Scottish stage) encouraged the company
to carry on regardless. The actors were paid for the rehearsal period,
but not for the tour, which goes on to the beginning of next month,
taking in Edinburgh and Strathclyde community venues, Aberdeenshire,
Lyth, and Ballachulish.
It would be pleasing to be able to recommend it unreservedly, but
neither in performance nor staging does Eve Jamieson's production come
firmly to grips with the play. Simultaneously cinematic and static, it's
not an easy piece, and the problems begin with Niki Longmuir's kitchen
set -- from Hygena's tropical collection, perhaps -- which fails to give
form to the tension between the claustrophobia of Hollywood and the
spaces of the Californian desert that the text cries out for.
Struggling with their environment and each other, brothers Lee and
Austin, the one a putative screenwriter, the other a hobo housebreaker,
offer a challenge to actors Robert Paterson and Mark Coleman. Paterson's
Tom Waits-ish streetwise shambling Lee is a captivating creation,
relaxed and fully realised from expansive gesture to drunken mumble.
Coleman's Austin is in nothing like the same league.
His awkward physicality is less part of the portrayal of an
anal-retentive, more a real lack of focus on what makes Austin tick. The
battle between the two brothers will always be an unequal contest, but
here dialogue that should crackle with the edge of the unspoken often
falls flat. Paul Birchard provides strong support as the fickle
Hollywood producer, but it is Paterson that makes the show worth
watching.
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