The God of Hell

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.

Our Review:

27 October 2005

“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 ...

Read more of the review

Latest User Review

62.6.139.13) - 28 November 2005:

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. ...

Read more and add your own review