Cynicism is writ large in Sam Shepherd's short work Savage/Love. Here the alleyways of human affairs are populated by the selfish and the pitiable. Shepherd dispenses with a cohesive narrative and naturalistic characters and instead presents us with an abstract collage of generic emotional and psychological states, scattered across nineteen monologue poems. His men and women wear their love like cellophane skin, adroitly and knowingly displaying the bones of self-interest, fear, and desperation that lie beneath.
      Shepherd gives us sketches of human behaviour that are bitter and blackly comic. Two people stand in front of us smiling and holding each other, but their words belie their actions - one tells us that now they are ‘acting' the partners in love. This is a stark observation of the untruths that lovers may deal in, but it can also stand as a comment on the falsity of the stage - on how an audience is normally complicit in its own emotional manipulation.
      The voices we hear express the universal flaws of love - jealousy, insecurity, pride - the little deaths love can inflict on the soul. Their lines are characteristically Shepherd - incisive and spare. But they sound out no genuine joy, no altruism, caring or kindness and little that is tender. As such there is not any light to measure the misery by. The narrow focus can leave the piece seeming a small and tired exercise, unless it is inventively staged and the performances injected with a degree of mad, lyrical passion.
      Anthony Biggs' production suffers from a visually cluttered set, better suited to the second play in this brace (Motel Chronicles), but in truth too heavy-handed for either show. The voices of Savage/Love should confront you and engage with you - the psychology that they lay bare should even embarrass you with its familiarity. But this production, even in such an intimate space as Theatre 503, fails to achieve such a visceral connection with its audience. But the production does provide a neat showcase for the four actors involved. The songs that punctuate the show like a mischievous radio are well sung and very funny. And Hugh Skinner performs The Thrill is Gone with a gloriously satisfying sense of irony and pastiche.
      Like Savage/Love, Motel Chronicles is a sequence of short scenes. Again it is held together by theme rather than narrative - the melody here is the twin one of motels and roads. But there the comparability between the two pieces ends. Motel Chronicles is not about a universal experience - it is about the American experience. It is suffused with the accents and bugs and dust and belt buckles of the Southern States. Shepherd reworked its autobiographical sketches into the film Paris, Texas.
      Loaded with details specific to its locale, the trio of accent, time and place are the breath, blood and heart of these disconnected stories. Sadly, Gemma Kerr's production has little sense of any of them. With the exception of Oliver J Hembrough, the cast found the American accent an extremely slippery customer, and their attempts to grasp hold of it were just distracting. Their costumes had a distinct feel of contemporary London, and the introduction to the set of a large homemade ‘motel' sign and a cattle skull didn't do enough to evoke atmosphere. Casting Nick Richards in a monologue about a southern yokel with deformed incisors seemed a particularly bizarre choice. The actor is a good-looking young guy with teeth a Beverly Hills dentist could be proud of.
      However Hembrough (curiously reminiscent of Willem Defoe) told his stories with an intensity and humour that brought Shepherd's world to life. His performance carried in it an impression of the heat, tarmac and open lands lacking elsewhere in the production.
Iona Firouzabadi