Curse of the Starving Class

Abbey Theatre, Dublin

Over the past five years, Sam Shepard has become the Abbey Theatre’s most frequently staged playwright; a more regular presence than Marina Carr, Tom Murphy, Brian Friel or even Shakespeare. Do Shepard’s signature depictions of the American West – manly and mythic, blurring exterior and internal landscapes – map so readily onto this nation? Director Jimmy Fay’s new production of Shepard’s 1976 family tragedy certainly carries the strongest resonances – and the most uncomfortable parallels – for a contemporary Irish audience. “Banks are loaning money left, right and centre,” says Andrea Irvine’s Ella, sounding particularly insouciant about the robustness of property for someone whose husband has just kicked down the front door. “It can never depreciate like a car or a washing machine.” Well, you have to laugh.

This play marked Shepard’s transition from experimentation to naturalism and Fay’s production seems both stimulated and uncertain by the friction. Brien Vahey’s set is balanced precisely between the abstract and recognisable: a timber outline of a house which seems as rickety as a sheep pen. “Is this the inside or the outside?” Joe Hanley’s drunken paterfamilias, Weston, asks a temporarily sheltering lamb. Both the sheep’s unscripted reply on opening night and Paul Keogan’s burning bright lights seemed shrewdly equivocal.

In either case, its feuding inhabitants wish to bolt free. Ella plans to sell to a slippery lawyer and escape to Europe. Weston plans to sell to a vicious creditor and escape to Mexico. Meanwhile, sibling solidarity between Ciarán O’Brien’s threatened Wesley and Rose O’Loughlin’s headstrong Emma is no stronger: “Your brother’s pissing all over your charts.” Routinely, each family member searches deep into the refrigerator, like a chilly gateway to Narnia. But, empty or stocked, it never satisfies.

This may be a post-War Californian avocado farm – and Philip Stewart dusty blues soundtrack best nails the accent – but the play’s clearest connection is to classical tragedy. O’Brien, steadily more beaten, worries constantly about foreign “invasion”, yet it’s his father’s “poison” he cannot escape.

Hanley’s explosive drunkenness is so hideously compelling that it is most stunning to suddenly see him spruce and sober, but the performance comes at the expense of others, with O’Brien often reduced to the role of passive listener or over-basted symbol wearing his father’s clothes and answering to his name.

Do we need such heavy inscription? Readers of this paper’s sobering letters page know that hunger is not a metaphor. “The whole thing’s geared to invisible money,” Weston says of the credit and consumption that have stoked the Tates’ appetites and emptied their fridge. “Why not go in debt for a few grand, if all it is is numbers?” This striking production leaves a lingering impression of that curse and its relevancy. Right now, though, it feels like they’re rubbing it in.

Runs until September 10