YOU can't hurry a Sam Shepard play. And with all the experience of their previous, tastefully presented productions at their fingertips, Prime Cut Productions (formerly Mad Cow) have admirably succeeded in not doing exactly that.
Jackie Boyle's directing debut, for the company she founded with Simon Magill in 1992, is an impressive one. It takes tight discipline and control to maintain energy and momentum through Shepard's patient unpeeling and close up examination of an unsavoury - and largely unspecified - past encounter in a motel room in the desert town of Asuza. But the excellent cast of six remains single minded and concentrated, as they move smoothly along the actual and psychological route of the San Bernardino Freeway in California and down to the blue grasps state of Kentucky, picking up the threads of a sordid scam, which has made one man very rich and another a mental, physical and financial wreck.
For most of the action we are in the heart of Shepard country - the dead end America of trailer parks, shabby, run down accidental towns, where, within hailing distance of the glitz and glamour of LA, people find themselves out of work and out of hope.
From the horse racing affluence of Kentucky appears Lyle Carter (Bill Leadbetter), on an errand of mercy to shabby. Cucamonga in California, where his old mate Vinnie (John Keegan) is in a bad way. But while Carter appears to be on a roll - successfully set up in Midway with a big house, two kids, a nanny (Heidi Siegrist) and an ostensibly happy marriage with Vinnie's former wife Rosie (Eleanor Methven) - it is Vinnie who has the power to wipe him out, with one flash of the evidence of the squalid sting the three of them pulled on a wealthy bloodstock agent (Des Nealon), who has since had to change his name.
Blaithin Sheerin's swirling dusty backdrop subtly reflects the murky past and present of these four unlikely companions, into whose drama the nervy, naive Cecilia Ponz (a wonderful performance by Niamh Linehan) steps, in total but exploitable innocence.
A mean, moody soundtrack of music by Dylan and Emmylou Harris winds the whole horrible affair back to a beginning which, literally, has to end.
