True West, Tricycle Theatre

Sam Shepherd's darkly comic drama explores the American psyche through two contrasting characters played by Alex Ferns and Eugene O'Hare.

Sam Shepherd's True West is a classic American drama and somewhat self-consciously so. Its two leads, the bourgeois university graduate Austin and his brother the drifter and dissolute Lee, represent two parts of the American psyche. 

This transfer from Glasgow's Citizen Theatre manages to fully evoke the conflict, with Max Jones's set perfectly capturing the unsettling atmosphere of the desert encroaching on suburbia, caught between Los Angeles and the Mojave desert, another apt metaphor for the conflict of identity.

These myths of Americana are seized gleefully and then torn up, with the brothers' jealous and derisive attitude towards each other's chosen life paths creating tense drama with beautiful naturalistic dialogue. This can be difficult for non-American actors to pull off well, but Eugene O'Hare and Alex Ferns, most famous for his role as Trevor Morgan in EastEnders, manage perfectly. Under the direction of Philip Breen, this is a darkly comic play that should not be missed.