His animal-trainer sadism toward Haynes, whom he pulls around on a lead, with electrodes attached to his penis, evokes the atrocities in Abu Ghraib and the government's refusal to forbid the use of torture in US military facilities. " I miss the Cold War with all my heart," the waitress mused in States of Shock, Shepard's 1992 response to the first Gulf conflict. That play, though, about the Abraham-and-Isaac-like sacrifice of sons to the war machine, had a mythic dimension and an ambiguity that are wholly lacking in The God of Hell.The author's nightmare vision of an America heading toward totalitarianism is conveyed in vivid, hectoring images. But he turns out to be the bullying neo-con from hell as his disturbing designs on Haynes (who is radioactive and must be forcibly detain-ed) and on the couple's home become clear."I miss the Cold War so much," Frank cries towards the end, when electric shocks to his genitals have persuaded him to sell up his stock and relinquish his home to a government think-tank. In devious pursuit of him comes Ben Daniels's excellent Welch, a smirking, besuited and lethally teasing official, who at first poses as a seller of patriotic knick-knacks "complete with a brand new remixed CD of Pat Boone singing 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic'".
Theirs is an isolated life; a wave from the propane-delivery man is a major event. But now this out-of-touch, innocuous existence is about to be ripped apart.Hiding in their basement is Haynes (a twitching, scabbed and gibbering Ewen Bremner). This old friend of Frank's appears to be on the run from some top-secret government research centre in Colorado, and his hands emit weird blue flashes whenever touched. The author rushed the play into production before last year's US election and helpfully described it (though you'd have to be in a coma not to get the message) as "a take-off on Republican fascism". The setting is a Wisconsin dairy farm, where Frank (Stuart McQuarrie) tends his beloved heifers, and Emma (Lesley Sharp) obsessively over-waters her large, cranky collection of plants. The same is true of The God of Hell, Sam Shepard's furious and wacky assault on the Bush administration, which now receives its English premiere in a robust, vividly acted production at the Donmar Warehouse, directed by Kathy Burke. Still, works such as Embedded, Tim Robbins's Iraq war satire, and Romance, David Mamet's courtroom burlesque, are in no danger of being indicted for subtlety Vigour, black zaniness, bite - those, they have Sustained dialectical argument - no.
Can one detect an equivalent process with George Bush? I was going to say that playwrights have been goaded into penning theatrical attacks so broad and crude that even he stood a strong chance of understanding them - that notion, though, may be overly optimistic about the Presidential perception. On Wednesday, Atwood staged a dramatic reading of The Penelopiad with help from Phyllida Lloyd, who first met Atwood while directing the opera of The Handmaid's Tale.. One of the malign effects of Lady Thatcher's premiership was that she sometimes dragged antagonistic dramatists down to her own level of peevishness and spite. The Penelopiad is part of "The Myths" series, laun-ched by Canongate Books and encompassing 33 publishers worldwide, for which prestigious writers tell new versions of ancient myths. But her latest work takes its inspiration from Homer's Odyssey, though as one might expect from the author of The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood's is a female-focused version.