Theatre Review: Curse of the Starving Class

Published on Wednesday 25 March 2009 18:55

THE title song of the great 1940s musical Oklahoma says it all, about the role of land in the American Dream. "We know we belong to the land," roars the chorus, "and the land we belong to is grand!"

But that sense of post-war hope and self-belief proved hard to sustain, for many thinking Americans; and by the late 1970s, the great playwright, screenwriter and actor Sam Shepard was churning out a memorable series of dystopian dramas about an American world gone wrong, in which the dream of popular land ownership has turned sour, and the Little House on the Prairie has become a run-down shack on the edge of oblivion, about to be sold off to the spivs of the development industry.

Curse of the Starving Class is one of the least known of Shepard's plays, first seen in New York in 1978, but to judge by Mark Thomson's vivid revival at the Royal Lyceum, it's a brave and fiercely energetic piece of American absurdism that deserves a much wider audience. The play is set in the kitchen of the Tait family's crumbling farmhouse near the Mexican border, where the huge refrigerator is always symbolically empty, and the family's loud denials that they belong to the "starving class" are accompanied by a near-total lack of food. The father, Weston, is an ugly, discontented drunk who drops by only rarely. The mother, Ella, is a deceptively fragile-looking nutcase, a woman who dreams of escape, like a robust and randy version of one of Tennessee Williams's ageing southern belles. The son, Wesley, is a visionary drifting towards the edge of real insanity, as he wanders the stage naked, with a large live lamb in his arms; the pubescent schoolgirl daughter, Emma, claims to be the sanest, but is soon riding a horse into her father's favourite drinking den and opening fire on all present.

Curse of the Starving Class is a kitchen-sink drama that never looks truly naturalistic, and soon takes off into the realms of the surreal and the ridiculous. But it's a tribute to the wild poetry of the play itself, and to every member of Thomson's cast, that the show succeeds in negotiating its oblique, absurdist relationship with reality, without ever losing its sense of satirical connection with the unrelenting, cash-driven world in which, over the last three decades, Americans have increasingly had to live. Familiar television faces Christopher Fairbank and Carla Mendonca turn in powerful performances as Weston and Ella, bound together in a hate-driven marriage from hell. Alice Haig is outstanding as their daughter Emma, shifting in a psychopathic moment from bright-schoolgirl conformity to raging lunacy; there's strong support from a series of Scottish-based actors – Neil McKinven, Stewart Porter, Mark McDonnell and Jordan Young – as assorted lawyers, chancers, policemen and gangsters. And Georgia McGuinness's luridly lit white set – with a jagged neon lightning flash overhead – captures exactly the right sense of a familiar reality distorted and made strange; as if God had somehow left his American heaven, never to return.

&149 Curse of the Starving Class is at the Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, until 11 April.