While Americans write in the shadow of Epidaurus, we remain harnessed to the Ten O'Clock News
What is it about American writers? Offer them a blank sheet of paper and they immediately go off and sharpen their pencils, thinking that it's an invitation to the top table at nominations for the Pulitzer Prize 2007. On this side of the pond, we seem to prefer a literary landscape that's a bit more, shall we say, prosaic, from Bridget Jones to Saturday.
It's the same with contemporary drama; while we have key dramatists who enjoy focusing on life on a council estate, or at a tabloid newspaper, or local government, Americans readily dispense with all that everyday claptrap. No, they insist. Forget about filing cabinets! What we want from a night out at the theatre is The Human Condition, Sex, Death and Families, preferably all at once, preferably washed down with the sound of crickets whirring or cars zooming past, and tinted throughout with neon lights and the bitter taste of too much whiskey. Then, buddy, you will have a proper piece of drama.
Go to see David Hare's The Permanent Way, and you will be thrown into the intricacies of the British Rail sell-off. Go to see the latest Sam Shepard, which has just opened at the Almeida in London, and you will be thrust into the seething cauldron of eternal human torment. The Late Henry Moss premiered in San Francisco six years ago, but you could as easily stage it in Greek masks and sandals.
Rather than a chiton, however, Shepard has assumed nothing so much as the mantle of Tennessee Williams. There's an angry, dying old father, whose demise is the catalyst for the events. There are two furious young sons who tussle over his legacy. There's a sexy Spanish broad who takes no time to get naked and leap into a bath, laughing her head off. There's the kind Mexican neighbour who brings soup over and represents nutrition and order. Most of the cast have, at various points, their lips glued to a bottle of Jack Daniel's. And there's a classic Shepard figure: the stranger, in this case a rather endearing taxi driver, who walks in off the high road to Albuquerque and throws the whole throng into disarray.
Identity, love, legacy, truth, even time are questioned in this work. Compared to something like Stuff Happens (Hare's drama on the Gulf war), which is even now looking like a period piece, The Late Henry Moss bowls out at you with "Set Text, 2016" written all over it. But, you protest, Sam Shepard has always wanted to be seen as eternal. Did he not co-write the screenplay for Paris, Texas, perhaps the most eternal American movie ever? What about other leading American playwrights - Edward Albee or David Mamet? There's nothing classic or archetypal about, say, having sex with a farmyard animal, or a racket at an estate agency, is there?
Indeed, but these playwrights still use situation in their plays (The Goat, Glengarry Glen Ross) as a cipher with which to examine human frailty, relationships and identity, in just such a manner as Shepard and Arthur Miller do - indeed, as great playwrights across the western world have done, from Jonson to Ibsen and back to the Greeks. It is as if American drama is ambitious to work willingly in the shadow of Epidaurus. Whereas your typical British dramatist seems keen to stay pretty much harnessed to the remit of the Ten O'Clock News.
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