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Buried Child

  • opened: 9/29/2004
  • closed: 12/15/2004
  • National Theatre, Lyttelton
  • Box Office: 020 7452 3000
  • Details: In rep to Dec 15 2004
  • Summary: Visit theARCHIVE to hear a discussion. In Sam Shepard's 1978 Pulitzer Prize-winning family drama, receiving a revival by one of the playwright's favoured English directors, Matthew Warchus, Vince turns up at his grandfather's Illinois farmstead with girlfriend Shelly; and what a non-welcome he receives. Dodge, his grandpa (M Emmet Walsh), is a senile menacing drunkard, slouching on the sofa; grandma (Elizabeth Franz) makes her excuses and heads off with the local priest; a surprise guest, Vince's dad Tilden (Brendan Coyle), is acting equally whacko, and when Vince (Sam Troughton) heads off into the night, it's left to his hapless partner (Six Feet Under star Lauren Ambrose) to fend off unwanted male attention in a house contaminated with failure and deadly secrets. In the Times, Benedict Nightingale was enthralled, doling out four stars: 'For Shepard, the family is not a refuge, but an inescapable trap that entices, grabs and then maims or kills, and its tradition are its curse, a handing-down of mutilated minds and hearts from one generation to another... Tough stuff, but, after an opening all too successful in establishing this house’s endemic boredom, darkly funny and gruesomely arresting...Matthew Warchus's uniformly excellent cast kept me appalled and agog, amused and repelled.' The Guardian's Michael Billington was impressed: 'Warchus.. heightens the play's nightmarish quality: the action begins with an ominous curtain of rain and the first reference to the dead child is accompanied by a tingling pause and distantly sounding strings. But the production also accentuates Shepard's wild comedy. All the actors... capture the mood of surreal dementia. M Emmet Walsh's Dodge is a parodic icon of blasted antiquity. Brendan Coyle's Tilden, clutching armfuls of corn, is both comic and menacing. And John Rogan, as a visiting minister, waves an ironic arm when he talks of a "real family." But the skill of Warchus's production lies in its reminder, under the laughter, of the deadly secrets we all of us choose to bury.' In the Daily Telegraph, Charles Spencer was wowed: 'Buried Child won him [Shepard] the Pulitzer Prize, and marked his transition from off-Broadway experimentalist to inheritor of the tradition of Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee. In Matthew Warchus's gripping and often wildly funny production, the piece now looks like a copper-bottomed American classic.' He went on: 'The acting is outstanding. Human beings don't seem to come much more disgusting than grandfather Dodge, and the American film actor M Emmet Walsh captures his repertoire of coughs, whines and belligerence with hideous verisimilitude. But Dodge seems like a saint compared with the malign sadist that is Uncle Bradley, unforgettably played by Sean Murray like an injured rat with a vicious bite.' In the Financial Times, Alastair Macaulay reached for the superlatives: 'The play's faults, which bother me scarcely at all, include an inclination to let individual dramatic situations stick in ruts and to create more mystery about the remembered past than we need; and the ending strikes me as too neat for so shaggy a play. The play's virtues include its humour, its bleakness, its wildness, its huge psychological resonance and the unpretentiousness of its demotic speech. Its characters are prosy, uncouth, coarse; yet there is about them something so unfettered that the play feels lyrical.' In the Sunday Telegraph, Catherine Shoard declared: 'The action matters less than the set-up, which is so magnificently gruesome it's just a pleasure to sink into the seamy muddle of madness and lucidity, incest and loathing... It's brilliantly, unpredictably directed by Matthew Warchus, with some great howling guitar and fence-clattering blues blasting out between scenes. The acting is first-rate...' In the Sunday Independent, Kate Bassett didn't like the start or the end of the production ('Warchus allows the closing scenes to become too ponderous').. 'In between, however, it is riveting, hilariously crazy and chilling. The long, horrific silence between Shelly and Tilden's potentially psychotic brother - when he holds his finger inside her mouth - must be one of the most quietly terrifying scenes in 20th-century theatre.' In the Sunday Express, Mark Shenton offered only three stars, finding it acted with 'compelling, quirky strangeness.' In the Mail on Sunday, Georgina Brown decided: 'If you didn't laugh, you'd cry. Matthew Warchus's pitch-perfect and brilliantly performed production brings out all the savage comedy, the terrible tragedy and the wildly poetic theatricality in this desperate family drama filled with buried secrets.'
  • Author: Sam Shepard
  • Director: Matthew Warchus
  • Composer: Gary Yershon
  • Lyricist: Set Designer: Rob Howell
  • Lighting Designer: Natasha Katz
  • Costume Designer:
  • Choreographer:
  • Cast Details: Lauren Ambrose (Shelley); Brendan Coyle (Tilden); Elizabeth Franz (Halie); Sean Murray (Bradley); John Rogan (Father Dewis); Sam Troughton (Vince); M Emmet Walsh (Dodge).