Fool For Love - The Peacock

Written by: Sam Shepard

Directed by: Annie Ryan

Starring: Don Wycherley, Catherine Walsh, John Kavanagh and Andrew Bennett.

www.theabbeytheatre.ie

****

Here we have another play revolving around the ideas of stark opposites and inescapable fate. But while Blood Brothers roared and soared – Fool For Love sneers and cusses. The 1983 Sam Shepard play is the latest in a line from the prolific writer, actor and director to appear in The Peacock – this time under the direction of The Corn Exchange’s Annie Ryan.
Set in the early 80s and staged in a run down motel room, somewhere in the Mojave Desert; Fool For Love is a gritty showdown between Eddie, a cowboy, and May, his one-time sweetheart.
The set design ensures the atmosphere is almost palatable – sitting in my seat before the performance I listed carefully to the strains of Johnny Cash playing lowly behind the murmur of the crowd. Misshapen, battered and dusty Venetian blinds throw a long, slanted shadow across a porridge-lump bed complete with worn woolen blankets; two maligned and maimed bedside lamps jut from the wall…I can’t see the toilet bowl but I just know its porcelain is cracked and stained a permanent smoky yellow. There’s a cheap wooden door, and I wonder is it there to open out onto a prettier world, or to keep what’s inside locked up.
Eddie (Don Wycherley) and May (Catherine Walsh) undoubtedly think the same thing, the dank room serves as bleeding ground, where the two wrestle, both verbally and literally, and struggle to make sense, amends or ends of their relationship. Eddie struts with a self-assured, tequila-loosed cockiness, which at time flares to hotheadedness; while May seems torn between the futility of it all, and her obvious, undeniable feelings for him. We are represented with a wild west that we aren’t used to seeing. One of small bickering and real heartache. The motel room becomes scene to a kind of shootout of shrewdness and manipulation– where every shared memory or past utterance is heaved up and into an ever-growing arsenal.
It did take a short moment to grow accustomed to the south-west-meets-deep-south twang of both the central characters, however accentual niggles simply melt when confronted the superbly drawn narrative. The plot heats and brews, accompanied by the ever present flavour of the on-looking hobo (an excellent and fearsome John Kavanagh) and May's wide-eyed date Martin (Andrew Bennett) – who finds himself trapped between the warring pair.
Wycherly and Bennett provide much of the dark comic element – with Wycherly exuding a charming, swaggering menace towards what his newly acquainted rival; while the ever innocuous Bennett makes us squirm as he nods lamb-like, blissfully unaware of the grinning wolf in waiting.


Fool For Love is a very physical piece of theatre – both in its content and its performance (Wycherley's lassoing and tumbling must be applauded). A tug of war love affair between two very different people – different not only from one another, but from the stereotypes put upon them. Shepards tale leads us backwards through the story. And a little more of the history between the pair is revealed with each slug of tequila.

The matinee showing I attended was full - and as I made a hasty march to the pub through the cold, biting air afterwards I thought long and hard about what I'd seen. I was by no means immediately won over - but Fool For Love is the kind of play that creeps into your conciousness over the following days, leaving raw red whip marks of thought, and a thirst for more.