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Synopsis Frank and Emma are American dairy farmers, alone in the Mid-West. Nothing ever happens. Nothing has happened for years. But now there's a mysterious man hiding in their basement; and a slick government official has come knocking at their door. Pay close attention. It's time to get ready for a bright, new American future and things are going to start moving very, very fast.
“He makes a whole different kind of ‘America’ visible behind the obvious, contemporary one,” the film director Wim Wenders has said of Sam Shepard. And who would disagree? Shepard is perhaps the most uncomfortable of America's giant playwrights. He takes few prisoners in a mythic landscape of desperate cowboys, domestic mayhem and a frontier, Wild West turned gothic by internal, psychic disturbance.
Chill winds blow through Shepard territory. And The God of Hell is no exception. But this time, it's external. Kathy Burke's hard-driving Donmar production ends with a mid-west moan echoing through the audience, emblematic of the condition Shepard evidently feels his country to be in.
Something is rotten in the state and in The God of Hell, first premiered last year in New York, Shepard doesn't mince his words or his images. “We're in absolute command now,” yells Ben Daniels' mesmerising government henchman, Welch. “No more of that nonsense of checks and balances...all that hanging around in limbo, waiting for decisions from committees and tired-out lobbies.”
By a long chalk, The God of Hell is certainly not Shepard's best – hardly comparable with Fool for Love, True West or even Matthew Warchus' magnificent revival of Buried Child last year for the NT. By comparison, this new play feels like a crude slab of anti-government propaganda. Which is to say, this is Shepard, the undiminished, counter-culture radical in full flow, giving us a warning (as much environmental in the cause of small farmers as political) in a setting caught between everyday realism (terrific American interior from Jonathan Fensom) and the plainly surreal.
Frank (Stuart McQuarrie), a docile dairy farmer and Emma (a surprisingly winsome Lesley Sharp) are living quiet domestic lives on their Wisconsin farm when they are visited by two strangers – Welch and a friend of Franks, Haynes – a scared, paranoid-fuelled Ewen Bremner. He's red hot, so red hot, if you touch him, sparks literally fly.
Like Pinter's The Birthday Party (with which it shares definite similarities), unnamed terrors and unanswered questions hang in the air: the reasons for Haynes' institutionalised torture, his plutonium contaminated (the god of hell of the title) state. A little local leakage perhaps?
Suffice it to say, lives are overturned forever and Shepard's disgust with officialdom emerges as something close to a grotesque parable and twice as damning. American Democracy never looked so shaky. Ignore at your peril.
An unforseen effect of the Iraq War has been the impact on two of America's finest contemporary writers. First Mamet's risible Romance and now this pathetic sixth-form rubbish from Sam Shepard. For satire to be effective it must have some grounding in reality but thanks to Kathy Burke's lumpen directing this is no more than paranoid ranting. It's not helped either by some dubious acting, particularly from Ben Daniels, which raises doubts about The Wild Duck which follows this at the Donmar. The only saving graces: Lesley Sharp manages to maintain an air of complete bewilderment (shared by most of the audience), the set which is unusually lavish for the Donmar and it's mercifully short. - 62.6.139.13)
28 Nov 05
Brief as it is, I thought this a super piece of in-yer-face shock-horror-comic theatre, a genre we see little of these days (though I think we can find links with Shopping and Fucking and even the outrageous Romance). Of course it's in a different style to some of Sam Shepherd's other plays (which we may prefer?) but we must be careful not to try to compare chalk with cheese, even from the same author. This one was like a graphic novel on stage, (Pinter with klaxons?) and was probably nearer in tone to the newspaper political cartoon than the Comments column. I did find it hilariously laugh-out-loud funny, even while I was cringing from the tension and surprises. The larger-than-life performances were spot-on and, of course, being in the confines of the Donmar, made for more uncomfortable viewing. In the loo afterwards, a man was complaining that it was disgraceful that the Donmar should be producing this sort of crap - proof positive that the play was right on target! I'm with the four star critics.
- 82.43.174.127)
03 Nov 05
I love Sam's play seen so many and of course the recent NT production.
BUT WHY PROGRAMME THIS PLEASE DONMAR??
Love your work, see most things but this non stop rant at Bush with no real skill in the writting is awful.
Very well directed by Kathy with an A1 cast - but what a waste! - 217.13.129.151)
01 Nov 05
What you think of this play will probably depend on whether 'you're with him or against him' (Bush, that is). If you're 'with him' you'll consider it an infantile leftie rant. If you're 'against him' you're consider it a searing thought-provoking satire. If you are that rare animal who is neither with him or against him, you'll probably find it a finely acted, wonderfully staged black black comedy which you're still thinking about the following morning..... like I am. Theatres need to put on plays about real issues now, so the God of Hell should be welcomed -whoever you're with. - 81.157.176.78)
01 Nov 05
Bombastic and lacking in subtlety it may be, but play does make the point very graphically, that if the things being done in the name of freedom and ordinary 'patriotic' Americans, in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib were actually perpetrated in the living rooms of most ordinary Americans then public opinion would be different. - 82.2.91.31)
29 Oct 05
A pathetic play, really piss-poor. I was embarrassed for the theatre, the cast, the director, the author. If they really think that this sixth-form skit, this second-hand rip-off of hackneyed satire and Pinter cliches, is any kind of a challenge to the current US administration, then they are so far into la-la land that there is no saving them. To waste all of those resources on something this bad is shameful. Shepard ought to be ashamed of himself. The Donmar ought to apologise to its public. Theatregoers ought to realise how tiny in mind the people running our theatres are. Self-congratulatory, adolescent, dashed-off toss. - 86.139.178.104)
29 Oct 05
A load of pretentious claptrap. What on earth is the Donmar doing staging this rubbish? Mercifully it's only 75 minutes long. - 62.64.161.16)
29 Oct 05
An exciting, hilarious and scary piece of inyerface agitprop theatre. Kathy Burke and her brilliantly fearless cast serve Sam Shepherd's wonderfully angry satirical cartoon on the USA's paranoia post 9/11. A real wakeup call to all Middle Americans who still believe they live in "the land of the free." - 212.100.250.216)
26 Oct 05
Let me ehcoe the comments of Pettinger: this may be some people's cup of tea but I found this production to be just ghastly. The acting are horrid (lots of phyisical effort and spitting does not equal effective) the jokes are obvious and laboured (lots of slapstick and cheap puns), the play makes little sense (who know's what the manin the cellar is doing there), and the politics is, well, just plain daft! The Neo-Cons in the US are a great threat to many people but not the ones being threatened in the play, middle American farmers. George Bush lives on a, er let me think, ranch! Like bad student theatre. - 195.93.21.101)
25 Oct 05
Great author, solid director, great cast but a terrible production. Too obvious, too pretentious, too self-righteous. It was like being hit over the head with repetitive blows from a political mallet. In the absence of entertainment I expect something of interest at least. Some enthusiastic applause at the end so I can only assume that friends of the production were in. I warn you now not to spend your hard-earned on this schoolboy political broadcast. - 80.5.89.162)
Re-opened in 1992. Seats 254. 1999 - Ambassador Theatre Group takes over from the Associated Capital Theatres as the landlord of the Donmar Warehouse. 2002 - Michael Grandage succeeds Sam Mendes as Artistic Director of the Donmar. Nick Frankfort succeeds Caro Newling as Executive Producer.
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