Shepard's charm shines through
The Ages Of The Moon
Peacock Theatre, Dublin
Sean McGinley and Stephen Rea in Sam Shepard?s 'Ages of the Moon', directed by Jimmy Fay
The last Sam Shepard play commissioned by the Abbey featured Stephen Rea in a hole with a dead horse.
In this one, he's still in a hole, but he has Sean McGinley for company.
Byron (McGinley) has crossed several western states by Greyhound bus to be with his old friend Ames (Rea), who's having an emotional crisis brought on after busting up with his woman. They sit on Ames' porch, drink bourbon and wait for a total eclipse of the moon, due at 5am.
The great charm of Shepard's writing is its allusiveness and delicacy in spare, man-eat-man situations.
Byron and Ames work through their problems with each other with crude language, explosions of temper, physical violence and a shotgun; providing some comic moments. But it's the more reflective talk in between that gradually builds up the play's poetic weight.
Ames is mordantly exasperated by the impermanence of love, while Byron, in a just believable anecdote, evokes the raw beauty of the landscape when he tells how he carried his dead wife round their favourite beauty spots.
Byron's anecdote is a perfect illustration of Shepard's unsentimental approach, which is perfectly tailored to Rea and McGinley's gift for dry, low-key acting. And the effect is all the more powerful for being unfussy and understated. When the two characters share a blanket to watch the moon, it feels genuine.
Jimmy Fay's directing, light throughout, brings a quietly grandiose note in at the play's culminating moment, as the two sit witnessing the eclipse with a childlike wonder.
They may be a couple of displaced sexagenarians, but what's clear is they belong in their bit of the cosmos.
- John McKeown
