Review: Kicking a dead horse: ThePost.ie


TCH Archives > Sunday Business Post > 2007/04/01 > Review: Kicking a dead horse

Review: Kicking a dead horse
Sunday, April 01, 2007 - Edited by Helen Boylan
KICKING A DEAD HORSE, Written by Sam Shepard, Peacock Theatre, Dublin until April 7.

The various complex cowboys that have peopled Sam Shepard’s plays have turned the abstract fantasy of the Wild West on its head, making a mockery of the idea that authenticity might be found beyond the desert’s horizon.

In his latest play Kicking a Dead Horse, a one-man show receiving its world premiere at the Abbey Theatre, Shepard attempts a similar process of demystification. However, Hobart Struther (played by Stephen Rea) is an ill-conceived cowboy character, and his doomed quest for authenticity fails to find the ring of truth.

Struther is a cowboy-turned-art dealer who has returned to the desert, ‘‘hankering after a sense of being in his own skin’’.

His horse has just died, and in the empty endless desert landscape Struther is forced to confront the harsh physical reality of cowboy life and the artificiality of his cowboy dreams.

Despite self-conscious lighting cues and theatrical jokes addressed directly to the audience, the monologue form of the play is distinctly untheatrical.

The dramaturgical device of an alter-ego interrogating the stranded Struther is clunky and unclear, while the spontaneous appearance of a scantily clad woman with a rescued cowboy hat is indulgent.

Meanwhile, the stunning visual aspect of Brien Vahey’s tilted set (complete with life-size dead horse sculpted by Padraig McGoran and John O’Connor) fails to compensate for a stage scenario entirely lacking in atmosphere.

Rea, returning to the Irish stage after ten years, still holds a commanding stage presence, his frozen hangdog expression and his fixed sad eyes battling against the agitated physicality of his lean body.

Yet while Rea, as Struther, sets out to save himself, Rea’s performance cannot save the play. As Struther striving to find his voice, Rea is utterly convincing, but Shepard’s play, unfortunately, gives him nothing to say.

While making some timely, if unoriginal, observations about America’s historical legacy (contained in a single short speech lamenting the American dream of manifest destiny), the 70-minute piece is so underwritten that it seems more like a fragment from Shepard’s famous Motel Chronicles than a play.

As the latest theatrical offering from one of America’s greatest living playwrights, Kicking a Dead Horse is a big disappointment.

Shepard is not so much kicking a dead horse as milking the illusion of America’s scared cultural cow for all its worth.

Despite the celebrity appearance in this play, the one star rating below goes to the horse.

Rating:*

EXHIBITION

An exhibition of sculptures by American sculptor Alexander Calder and Spanish painter and sculptor Joan Miro´ will open at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), Kilmainham, Dublin, on April 4.

Calder developed a new method of sculpting by bending and twisting wire. He ‘‘drew’’ these three-dimensional figures in space.

Miro’s work contributed greatly to the Surrealist and Modern movements.

The pair were friends from the late 1920s until Calder’s death in 1967. Eleven of their works will go on display in IMMA’s 17th century courtyard.

This collection concentrates on the powerful burst of creativity which both artists enjoyed in the latter parts of their careers.

Miro and Calder are pictured (right) with Miro’s La Fourche (The Pitchfork, 1963) in the background.