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.

What	True West, Tricycle Theatre
Where	Kiln Theatre, 269 Kilburn High Road, London, NW6 7JR \| MAP
Nearest tube	Kilburn (underground)
When	04 Sep 14 – 04 Oct 14, 7:30 PM – 9:30 PM
Price	£11-29
Website	Click here to book via the Tricycle

What the critics say

THE EVENING STANDARD

"Breen savours the violence of Shepard’s writing while Ferns, who is on sensational form, exudes menace from every fibre of his being. But the play itself is uneven and repetitive, a series of sometimes dazzling riffs rather than a satisfying whole."

THE ARTSDESK

"brilliantly strange, raucously funny, rippling with resonance... It’s a very good fit for the Tricycle, whose intimacy heightens our sense of eavesdropping on one helluva sibling spat."

About Sam Shepard

Sam Shepard has been an actor and a director, but considers himself first of all a writer. He is known for his short stories, poems, sketches, essays and the screenplay for Wim Wenders's Paris, Texas.

A friend of Cormac McCarthy and Bob Dylan and past lover of Patti Smith, Shepard is quite a staggering personality whose powerful vision permeates his work. His writing is often set in motels, on vast highways and through arid plains of American desert - all tropes that evoke a romanticised True West.

Here are some choice quotes from Shepard in interview:

"We're on our way out, as a culture. America doesn't make anything anymore! The Chinese make it! ... All of those cities that used to be something. If you go to a truck stop in Sallisaw, Oklahoma, you'll probably see the face of America. How desperate we are. Really desperate. Just raw."

Speaking about the Mojave desert, where True West is set:

"I can remember going through this town when I was eight. ... I remember being very alone. Very, very alone. Being stranded on the train in the middle of Indian country.

About the Tricycle Theatre

Five minutes' walk from Kilburn tube station, or even fewer from Brondesbury Overground, the Tricycle Theatre has a reputation for supporting off-beat, powerful productions. A major coup for the Trike in 2012 was the success of Adrian Lester's Red Velvet, which returned in early 2014 for a swansong run.

The theatre is headed by Indhu Rubasingham, the first Asian woman to run a London Theatre. She recently decided to cancel the theatre's annual Jewish Film Festival on the grounds that the funding it receives from the Israeli government would mean that the Tricycle was taking sides in the Gaza conflict. After a very public falling out between the Festival and the Tricycle, the decision was retracted and the two groups have issued a joint statement saying "we hope to begin the process of rebuilding trust and confidence with a view to holding events in the future."

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.