Theatre - Katherine Duncan-Jones is impressed by a meta-theatrical study of family madness

To label Sam Shepard's modern family melodrama A Lie of the Mind as "Greek", "Shakespearean" or "Chekhovian" would be reductive, even though it has elements of all three. It is, above all, thoroughly American, right up to the symbolic climax in which a crumpled and bloodied Stars and Stripes is first unfurled, then carefully folded, and the choric old man Baylor (Keith Bartlett), seeming scarcely to notice the visible collapse of his entire family, staggers up to bed saying: "I don't wanna get woke up in the middle of a good dream." For this stubborn pioneer alone, the American dream lives on and still has value, almost like a memory of Troy or Camelot.

Tom Piper's clever set clearly locates this play about two abusive families in a western wilderness stretching from southern California to Montana. Its alien landscape is scarred with anonymous highways and pocked with undifferentiated human settlements. Yet it is not these towns or highways that we see, but the small, bleak nests of human habitation that are characteristic of Shepard's plays: a motel room on the edge of a desert; a side room in a hospital; a lightweight cabin in the snowy woods of Montana, far too fragile to withstand the shouting and shooting that take place inside. In such remote places, each of the eight characters struggles for self-definition through escape from the past, and especially from the oppressive personal history embodied in parents, spouses and siblings. These people inhabit a cultural wilderness, as well as a physical one.

In a more naturalistic play, one might protest at the unlikelihood of any kind of theatricals being performed there. But Beth, a battered wife, has provoked her husband's murderous jealousy by going out each evening to rehearse a play. This well-constructed tragedy, with its subtle symmetries, carries off even its most stagey or meta-theatrical conceits with assurance. It becomes clear that Beth truly is an actress in the brief scene that I cannot refrain from calling "Shakespearean", in which, wearing her father's huge shirt, she plays Rosalind to her Orlando, the wounded Frankie. Beth's "brain damage", which causes her staccato speech, matches the even deeper "damage" endured in different ways by all the characters, each of them hurt in their minds, none of them able to escape from the lies that fester within.

First performed in New York in 1985, A Lie of the Mind has its own past. Shepard described it as "a love ballad . . . a little legend about love". But that is not at all how it comes across in Wilson Milam's superb production. It seems, rather, to be an intricately patterned study of madness and the family, madness in the family, and the extraordinary ways in which families, especially mothers, when they try to offer solace, make things worse. Some of the best black humour in the play stems from this theme.

As in Shepard's Fool for Love (1982), the abusively violent "hero", Jake (Andy Serkis), continues to "love", or at least be obsessed by, the woman he has injured, but this is hardly the play's most compelling theme. What consistently grip the audience are the diverse performances of pain - of both mind and body. Even Jake's brother, the gentle Frankie (Peter McDonald), is shaking in septicaemic agony by the end, though only the audience seems to notice. Serkis is wholly convincing in his rage and despair, as is Catherine McCormack as the histrionic and radiantly beautiful Beth. A Lie of the Mind is altogether a triumph for the Donmar.

A Lie of the Mind is at the Donmar Warehouse, 41 Earlham Street, London WC2 (020 7369 1732), until 1 September

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