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Post by mallardo on Jan 6, 2017 13:13:52 GMT
So, a play about American xenophobia, about keeping it in the family to the exclusion of all outsiders. Where a son's death is blamed on his marriage to an Italian catholic, where a grandson who has left home is punished by being not recognized when he returns with a girlfriend. Seems pretty topical. All of the characters but one would have been Trump voters in the recent election.
And yet it doesn't remotely work. The people never come alive - they're collections of attitudes, and not very original ones. Not for the first time, I came away from a Sam Shepard play thinking that the guy doesn't know his characters at all. The clumsily constructed plot is just a series of manipulations geared to making an immediate impact, with no concern for logic - or truth.
It's not helped by some inept direction from Scott Elliott who gets the hinge of the story, the grandson, Vince's, return, all wrong both in terms of the staging and the playing. Charlotte Hope as Shelly, the girlfriend - the only onstage outsider and thus our surrogate - does well enough but Jeremy Irvine as Vince is all over the place and in need of help he clearly didn't get. None of his scenes play and they have to if this piece is to have any chance at all.
Ed Harris is excellent and fills every one of his moments but no one else approaches his level. It all made for a long, drab and generally unintelligible evening at the theatre.
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