CultureShock/Fintan O'Toole:Sam Shepard's new play is an artist's critique of the state of the US, in which a journey back to authenticity is an aesthetic response to politics
Political plays can be direct, with an obvious and simple connection to contemporary events. But the best of them tend to be indirect. One of the ironies of political theatre, indeed, is that such plays tend to look fairly similar whether they are written in conditions of relative freedom or of tight censorship. When playwrights live in police states - Shakespeare in Tudor England, Jean Anouilh in Nazi-occupied France, Marin Sorescu in Ceaucescu's Romania - they have to use the resources of metaphor. Shakespeare set his political plays in distant times or far-off plays. Anouilh staged a version of Antigone, trusting his audience to make the connections with their contemporary lives. Sorescu wrote a play about Vlad Dracula between whose lines a tuned-in audience could discern the lineaments of Ceaucescu.
But even when there is the option to be direct, a metaphorical approach often makes aesthetic sense. Brecht's best plays are fables, set in China or in the distant past, but with obvious lessons for the present day. And this aesthetic approach has allowed dramatists who are naturally allergic to directness to write nakedly political plays. Samuel Beckett did it with Catastrophe. Harold Pinter did it with Mountain Language. And now Sam Shepard has done it with his fascinating new play at the Peacock, Kicking a Dead Horse. It is about many things - middle age and mortality, romance and realism, illusion and disillusion - but one of them is undoubtedly the Iraq war. Not the war in itself but the impulses that got the US into it.
Kicking a Dead Horse is a small play - one speaking actor, 75 minutes - with a very big subject. As Stephen Rea's character Hobart Struther, a sixty-something dealer in western art, digs a hole in the desert in which to bury the horse that was supposed to take him on a journey back to cowboy authenticity, he is also uncovering layers of history.
In a sense, what's happened is not so much that Shepard has turned to politics as that American politics have turned towards Shepard. His characteristic terrain is the desert. His loners have always been emerging from, escaping to or surrounded by the desert. Its vast empty spaces have entered the hearts and souls of his people as if the continent is just too big for human contact to be sustainable. And that metaphor has become the stuff of current affairs. The Bushes, father and son, have, like Moses, led Americans into the deserts of Iraq, creating an exodus from which there is no exit to a promised land. Like Hobart, they have ridden off into a dusty wilderness in a desperate attempt to keep alive their cowboy mythology, only for the horse to die under them and leave them stranded.
Kicking a Dead Horse doesn't so much describe all of this as embody it. But it does also seek to explain it historically. Struther excavates the restless, violent impulse of Manifest Destiny, the phrase first coined by the Irish-American politician and columnist John L O'Sullivan in 1845 to encapsulate America's god-given right to expand and conquer the West. He finds himself at the fag-end of a process of restless domination: "We closed the frontier in 1890-something, didn't we? Didn't we already accomplish that? The Iron Horse - coast to coast. Blasted all the buffalo out of here. An ocean of bones from sea to shining sea. Chased the heathen Redman down to Florida . . . Whupped the Chinese and strung them up with their own damn pony tails. Decapitated the Mexicans . . . Dammed up all the rivers and flooded the valleys for recreational purposes. Run off the small farmers. Destroyed education. Turned our children into criminals. Demolished art. Invaded sovereign nations. What else can we possibly do?"
What makes the play work is that this isn't a politician's critique of the state of the US, but an artist's. It is not concerned with the economics of oil or the breaches of UN conventions or the number of Iraqi dead. It is about the spiritual vacuum that has to be filled now by foreign adventures, the hunger for ever more spaces to conquer, the tragedy of a collective instinct that will not die just because it has no real meaning anymore. Shepard's body of work explores those psychic spaces in domestic, intimate ways. Here, he does so through a simple clownish metaphor, a kind of solo Laurel and Hardy show with an absurd physical task - burying the dead horse - at its centre.
What's striking is that while the script is very funny to read, it becomes, in the playing, more melancholy than madcap. You can see why Shepard wrote it with Stephen Rea in mind. Rea gets laughs when he wants to, and Shepard makes good use of the restive physicality that you often miss in Rea's screen performances.
But it is his capacity to infuse everything, including farce, with sorrow that comes to the fore here. Something more than a horse has died, and, amid the absurdity, Rea enacts the strangely moving attempt to give it a decent burial.