Sam Shepard’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play is a Gothic horror story of incest and murder, more surreal than real. Premiered in 1978, Shepard held up a mirror to rural America and found a nation divided, demoralised and disenfranchised. The American Dream is a myth. The script feels like a marriage between Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming and Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms.
A young man (Jeremy Irvine) returns to his home after a long absence, accompanied by his girl friend (Charlotte Hope). The dysfunctional family deliberately fail to recognize him. Ed Harris, the distinguished American Hollywood actor, and his wife, Amy Madigan, who are making their London debut are cast as his strange grandparents.
The play is as weird as it always was but it is no longer, at least in Scott Elliott’s New York production, as spooky and as thrilling and certainly not as hilarious as I remember it