TRUE WEST

Bristol Old Vic

Two stars

The basic premise of Sam Shepard's play - a Hollywood screenwriter driven to total collapse when his dilettante brother hits the big time with his first off-the-cuff stab at a screenplay - will seem eerily familiar to those who saw the recent Charlie Kaufman movie Adaptation. Austin (Andrew Tiernan) is the Harvard graduate ensconced behind a laptop in LA., Lee (Phil Daniels) his boorish, hard-drinking brother who has wandered in from the desert. When Austin's producer Saul turns up, Lee pitches him with an idea which Austin considers amateurish rubbish, but which Saul takes up at the expense of Austin's own more highbrow project. Embittered Austin subsumes himself in Lee's life of drink, petty crime and desert survival, whilst Lee abjectly fails to make the reverse trip up to the smooth polish of the screenwriter's trade. The result is a brutal descent into chaos for both brothers.

This is potentially a thought-provoking play here. How is it that Austin can descend, but Lee cannot ascend, for example? Furthermore, as in Adaptation we are presented with two brothers who represent the bi-polar constituents of the author's personality, offering the opportunity to look inside Sam Shepard's head as the smooth professional writer and the rough frontiersman battle it out on stage, ending up trapped inescapably together in a single rubbish-strewn room, possibly for ever, as the lights go down. Shepard's play has the potential to be The Caretaker or Huis Clos. Wilson Malam's production allows it to be neither. There is no sense of claustrophobia. There is no effort to explore, extrapolate or enquire. There is no emotional subtlety. Instead it is little more than a messy and megaphonic display of two men shouting at one another for 2 hours.

Phil Daniels is - as ever - Phil Daniels, albeit that this being an American play, he adopts an accent to become Phil Daniels being Jack Nicholson. From the moment he staggers on stage, his performance is one of unadulterated (and never properly explained) ferocity. His delivery is steadfastly unvarying: lines that might have been wheedling, or pensive, or a simple observation, are all spat out in the same unwavering tone, an incandescent rasp like an aggrieved band saw. As the less horny-handed brother, Andrew Tiernan initially plays Austin so blandly and passively that Daniels seems to be alone on stage. Gradually, as the Fates conspire against Austin, he moves from being a featureless non-entity into an angry non-entity, the seething within depicted mainly by his delivery shifting gradually up the scale until every line is hooted like a constipated owl.

As the characters' lives and the set descend into chaos, so does the production. Instead of remembering the classic prescription of farce that the more chaotic things are on stage, the more disciplined the performances must be, Tiernan and above all Daniels launch into a frantic, out-of-control riff of near-slapstick destruction which is more reminiscence of one of those overextended improvisations in school drama classes, in which the participants are enjoying themselves so much that they fail to notice that the audience have been completely shut out. When the most riveting moment in a show is the annihilation of a laptop computer with a golf club, you realise that it's not theatre you're watching: it's merely performance art lapping at the fringes of self-indulgence.

Toby O'Connor Morse

Until November 22, Box office: 0117 987 7877