Sam Shepard was once regarded as the quintessential American playwright. But, on the evidence of the recent revival of the rambling A Lie of the Mind and the exhumation of this hour- long one-acter, he is a minor artist compared to Mamet or Kushner. Written during Shephard's London residency in the early 1970s, Action attempts to apply a sense of European angst to an American setting and yields only a sense of derivative desolation.
Shepard's title is clearly ironic. Four characters are holed up together in some lonely shack during the Christmas season. Outside is a world of darkness, fear and unspecified "crisis". Inside, the characters try to preserve a desperate normality and find scope for meaningful activity. The two women, Liza and Lupe, busily prepare the turkey, wash dishes or ritualistically hang out the washing. Of the two men, Jeep is a bear-like figure who finds solace in smashing furniture or gutting a fish, while Shooter seeks refuge from his terrors by curling up foetally in an armchair and then crawling about with it on his back like an upholstered turtle.
It doesn't take long to get the point: that these characters inhabit a Beckettian void that they attempt to fill through private recollections or mechanical action. Trapped behind a table filtering water into a fish-bucket, Jeeper nakedly asks: "Shooter, could you find some reason for me to move?" But Beckett's Godot has a contrapuntal gaiety as the two tramps fill the looming emptiness with rhythmical backchat and somehow manage to preserve a perverse hope: Shepard's play, in contrast, is all inspissated gloom in which even the attempt to resume telling an abandoned story - the American myth perhaps? - leads nowhere. And the playwright's macho sensibility is revealed in the way in which the men are at least allowed to articulate their memories while the women are mere domestic functionaries.
Arlette Kim George's production certainly creates the air of an enclosed ritual. And the four performers lend the monochrome text a colourful physicality. John Sharian's chair- smashing Jeep has the coiled menace of a baby Brando, Nicolas Tennant's Shooter seems oppressed by hidden fears and Isabel Pollen and Nicola Ratcliffe as the two women carry out their menial domestic tasks with an understandable look of simmering resentment. But the play now feels like a piece of European absurdism artificially grafted on to the American psyche. And, where the reputations of Lorraine Hansberry and Tennessee Williams have been much enhanced by the Young Vic's revival of their early work, that of Shepard is seriously diminished.
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