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Shepard's Fool & Lie Receive Summer Outings

The work of American playwright Sam Shepard (pictured) will receive double exposure this summer with major revivals of two of his plays. The Donmar Warehouse will present Shepard's 1986 family drama, A Lie of the Mind, in July while English Touring Theatre (ETT) will kick off its tour of the 1983 Fool for Love next month. The latter production also marks ETT's last tour before it relocates to their new London base from July 2001.

Fool for Love is a 90-minute slice of May and Eddie's painful love story. In a seedy motel room in southern California, the couple go back beyond their adult lives, back to the legacy of their parents and their parents before. As they challenge each other's versions of events, what emerges through broken images and scraps of remembered colours is a childhood which defines the rest of their lives.

The ETT production stars Julie Graham, Joseph Bennett, Paul Moriarty and Ken Christiansen. It's directed by Erica Whyman, currently artistic director at London's Gate Theatre, and is designed by Soutra Gilmour. The Fool for Love tour opens at Crewe's Lyceum Theatre on 8 May and continues until 30 June 2001 to Salford, Liverpool, Greenwich, Oxford and Malvern.

At the conclusion of the tour, the company, recently awarded a 25% increase in funding, will move into its new London base on Short Street in Waterloo. The new funds will also allow ETT to tour an extra production each year and to increase its education programme.

Also in London, A Lie of the Mind arrives later in the summer at the Donmar Warehouse, where Shepard's role-swapping Cain and Abel tale, True West, was mounted in 1994 in a critically acclaimed production directed by Matthew Warchus and starring the Globe's Mark Rylance. A Lie of the Mind, directed by Wilson Milam, will open on 4 July and continue for a limited run to 1 September 2001 (previews from 28 June). No casting details have yet been announced.

A Lie of the Mind involves another tortured couple, Jake and Beth, who have damaged each other irreversibly. Camped apart, their families close ranks, supposedly to protect them. But as brothers, sisters and parents come together under forensic scrutiny, the complexities that underscore each relationship on the siblings are revealed.

Shephard is well-known to cinema audiences for his acting roles in films such as The Right Stuff, Country, Steel Magnolias, Baby Boom and Paris, Texas, but he's also an award-winning writer. Plays by the American, who lived in England for many years, include Mad Dog Blues, The Tooth of the Crime, Geography of a Horse Dreamer and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Buried Child.

- by Terri Paddock

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