2025: True West by Sam Shepard

 

True West by Sam Shepard.  Ensemble Theatre, Sydney, September 8 – October 11, 2025.

Reviewed by Frank McKone
September 21

Playwright: Sam Shepard
Director: Iain Sinclair; Assistant Director: Anna Houston

    Cast
Mom - Vanessa Downing
Austin - Darcy Kent
Saul Kimmer - James Lugton
Lee - Simon Maiden

Set & Costume Designer: Simone Romaniuk
Lighting Designer: Brockman; Sound Designer: Daryl Wallis
Dialect Coach: Linda Nicholls-Gidley; Fight Director: Scott Witt
Stage Manager: Christopher Starnawski                                Asst Stage Manager: Bella Wellstead  Costume Supervisor: Renata Beslik

By arrangement with Music Theatre International (Australasia)

95mins (no interval)    Recommended for ages 14+
 

 Photos by Prudence Upton

Mom - Vanessa Downing, arrives home unexpectedly

Saul Kimmer - James Lugton,  Lee - Simon Maiden confront Austin - Darcy Kent
about doing a movie script-writing deal

______________________________________________________________

Donald Trump said today, in what should have been a solemn commemoration of the life and shooting death of Charlie Kirk, that he disagreed with Kirk on one point – that Charlie never hated those who opposed him. “He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them,” Trump said of Kirk. “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry,” Trump added. “I am sorry, Erika”, speaking to Kirk’s grief-stricken wife. [independent.co.uk]

What’s worse is that Trump sounded as if he was making a joke of the core American default state of mind – violence in word and deed.

Sam Shepard understood it was not a joke when he wrote True West in 1980 – nearly half a century ago.  Though the play is famous, I’m embarrassed to say that I had known nothing about it before seeing Ensemble’s presentation.  For the final fifteen minutes and for long after leaving the theatre, I was literally in a state of shock.  

The performances by Darcy Kent and Simon Maiden, directed with such accurate precision by Iain Sinclair (whose work I saw in his younger days in his Elbow Theatre, here in Canberra) was quite extraordinary, achieving all, perhaps even more, than Shepard could ever have wished for.
 

 

Lee confronts Austin with the toast made in toasters Austin has stolen
to satisfy Lee's earlier challenge that the intellectual Austin couldn't do practical things.

Lee teases Austin with the keys of Austin's car

 

 

Which, on reflection, makes his play as important today, here in Australia, as it was in his America.  Shepard said [ http://www.sam-shepard.com/truewest.html ] "I wanted to write a play about double nature, one that wouldn't be symbolic or metaphorical or any of that stuff. I just wanted to give a taste of what it feels like to be two-sided. It's a real thing, double nature. I think we're split in a much more devastating way than psychology can ever reveal. It's not so cute. Not some little thing we can get over. It's something we've got to live with."

But what Donald Trump and this frightening production shows is that True West is powerfully symbolic and metaphorical precisely because it is more than a mere taste of what it feels like to be two-sided.  The most awful feeling in the play is at the moment when the two brothers are at the point of killing each other as their Mom arrives home unexpectedly from what she had hoped would be a holiday.

She doesn’t seem really surprised to find her house almost destroyed in their drunken mayhem. It’s just something she’s got to live with, apparently.  Just like we have to live with Trump’s hatred which will tear the whole world apart.

 

Austin has lost his sense of propriety, and now behaves like his profligate brother Lee
shortly before their Mom arrives home.

 

As I searched for others’ views, I couldn’t do better than this, from Misha Berson written in 1997:

"'True West' isn't just a combustive slam dance of warring brothers. It also animates the psychic struggle of self and shadow self, and it makes vivid the unbridgeable split in the American West mythos between unfettered individualism and mainstream success, wide open space and subdivided wilderness. The play is inconclusive. It offers no healing of such divisions, no integration. It just lays out its contradictions with high-voltage dramatic force. It rocks, and reverbs."   ...Misha Berson, Seattle Times theater critic.

30 years later, we – in Australia – on social media and in the face of destructive climate change which we have caused ourselves;  do we not see that contradiction between unfettered individualism (in Lee) and the insistence on mainstream success (in movie producer Saul Kimmer), and between the wide open space of the natural world and the subdividing of the wilderness?

The shooting of Charlie Kirk has filled our news with arguments about political violence and gun control, as the Minister for the Environment struggles to control the expansion of the gas industry which has already awfully damaged the ancient heritage of Murujuga in Western Australia.

While a “sovereign citizen” has gone bush after killing police in Victoria – the Australian version of Sam Shepard’s characters (and apparently his own father) going to the desert to escape social responsibility.

Ensemble’s True West is quite simply a fantastic production, but be prepared for its powerful emotional effect on a personal level, and for the truth of its story on the wider social level.

Definitely not to be missed.  This is theatre art at its best.

 

 ©Frank McKone, Canberra