True West

Overview

Playing brothers Lee and Austin in Sam Shepard's True West on Broadway some years back, actors Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly were known to switch parts when the mood struck. This factoid is cool on its own, but once you've seen True West, you'll know it's deep, too.

The brothers are identified by their differences, but each contains the other within him. House-sitting for his mother is Austin (Brendan Cowell), the good son who can be trusted to water the plants and not steal the neighbours' televisions. He's on the verge of his Hollywood break, and as he works on his screenplay by candlelight, the lifting glow and flicker of movement reveal another figure in the room: Lee (Wayne Blair), the other brother, scrappy, itinerant and threatening. They started out middle class but ended up estranged in distant American realities. Austin is meeting with a producer tomorrow, and though he'd prefer Lee out of the house, Lee has his own story to peddle — a Western.

It's California, and the play takes place in the too-bright day and cloaking night. Plain domesticity clashes with neon scene changes. It's a setting of contrasts and codependence that in every way reiterates you can't have light without the dark.

The first half of the play is nice, an exercise in tensions waxing and waning with little propulsion and a rolling meditation on why we treat family the way we do, even when they disappoint or frighten us and even when we abuse or indulge them. But the play really saddles up around the 45-minute mark, when Shepard engineers an explosive and poetic reversal of roles that sees the men explore their latent undersides, admit mutual admiration, co-write a Western, drink and trash the joint. Austin's typewriter bears the brunt of their frustrations.

Staging True West must have been a bit of a gamble for the Sydney Theatre Company; the play relies on US narrative and popular culture in a way that means it can't be transplanted to a different time or place (with different accents), and even with these most committed of actors, the Americanisms at times seem jarring. Still, the production soars above those obstacles. Hoffman is directing this outing, which is a thrill, and he has clearly broken and bonded his cast. Blair and Cowell are amazing to watch here, each unbearably intense, in his own way.