One of the most enigmatic of all living American playwrights is the sometime movie star icon and writer Sam Shepard, who adds to his allure and mystery by refusing to fly: I once read an interview with him in which he wittily declared that not to be afraid of flying is a failure of the imagination. And a failure of imagination is the last thing you could ever accuse Shepard of possessing.
But even if he won’t fly, his work regularly does; and we seem to be in the midst of a mini-Shepard festival at the moment. Following the National’s revival of Buried Child a year ago (with a cast that included Lauren Ambrose, M Emmet Walsh and Elizabeth Franz), we now have two consecutive UK premieres for two of his most recent original plays. First up, there’s the Donmar opening of his latest, God of Hell, tonight (in a production directed by actress-turned-director Kathy Burke, who like Shepard straddles two worlds). First seen off-Broadway exactly a year ago when the author called it “a takeoff on Republican fascism”, Burke rejected the idea that it was an anti-American rant in an interview in The Observer last week: “What comes across to me is how much Sam Shepard loves America. It’s about how much the people in power are fucking it up.”
According to Jay Rayner, who conducted the interview, Burke “references Shepard often, says she is doing the play ‘for Uncle Sam’, and is proud of her gag.”
Then there’s the UK premiere of The Late Henry Moss to follow at the Almeida in January. I saw the US premiere of the latter five years ago in San Francisco, with a cast that Sonia Friedman or Bill Kenwright would probably kill for: Nick Nolte, Sean Penn, Woody Harrelson and Cheech Marin, all of whom alone would have been enough to sell it.
But in London, where Shepard himself once lived in the early 70s, Uncle Sam’s own reputation is sufficient to guarantee a receptive audience.
