True West

Somewhere deep inside someone’s idea of America’s glorious Old West – coyotes howling in the distance, crickets droning relentlessly on through the night – two modern-day gunslingers are locked in a modern-day showdown. Austin (Brendan Cowell) is a kempt, Ivy League-educated screenwriter busy working on his latest script by candlelight. His brother, materialising out of the shadows, is Lee (Wayne Blair), a desert wanderer and occasional thief. Austin in his pastel polo number, Lee in a shirt stained yellow with sweat: they seem very different men – but it might not be as clear-cut as that. Things can go a little fuzzy in the desert heat.

Philip Seymour Hoffman directs this production of Sam Shepard’s True West, a play that seems like it would be both a gift and possibly just a bit of a bitch for its actors – occasionally bucking and kicking like a bull in a rodeo but also relying on the careful management of subtext, loaded silences and the increasingly complex relationship at the centre of it all. There’s a hint of what the brothers’ powerplay is really about in the story that Lee dictates to Austin: one cowboy riding through a dark prairie chasing another cowboy, neither of them knowing where they’re going to wind up…

You’d be hard-pressed to find a duo that could keep up with Cowell and Blair at a mad gallop. Blair’s bushy, wild-eyed Lee is a shocking presence, a beast ready to charge at any moment; Cowell’s Austin is frequently, pathetically hilarious: tending to his mother’s ferns lovingly, crooning away in a boozy stupor and getting very giddy indeed about the prospect of toast for breakfast. Both Blair and Cowell demonstrate supreme control of the situation as their characters progressively lose it.

And boy, is it a pleasure watching them lose it. The fight choreography (Scott Witt) is ferocious, and what a joy to have actors of this calibre comprehensively trash Richard Roberts’s crash-tested set (not least for the actors, I’d wager). In its run so far, props have been broken, audience members showered with beer… and there’s been at least one reported instance of Blair losing his pants. Theatre with sweat, danger and some goddamn grunt. Marvellous. Darryn King