Sam Shepard's long career as a literary dramatist celebrates human experience over abstract expression, he tells Fintan O'Toole
At 63, Sam Shepard is still lithe, rangy and almost boyish. He still has the chiselled, angular features of a movie star and the easy self-possession of a rock star, reminding you that he is a great literary dramatist with more than a foot in popular culture. But he is warm and unfussy, speaks in a deep, drawling western accent and laughs a lot with a gleeful cackle that betrays no hint of cynicism or world-weariness. He has spent much of his time in the worlds of movies and music without apparently falling prey to their occupational hazards of egotism and incestuousness. He is full of enthusiasm about Dublin, the Abbey, and his old friend Stephen Rea ("He's so malleable, he can move in so many directions") whom he is directing in the world premiere of his new play, Kicking a Dead Horse. He is as happy to talk about his admiration for other writers as about himself. You sense in him the curiosity and openness that fuel a writer who already has more than 50 plays, as well as dozens of screenplays, prose works, poems and songs, to his name.
He is full, for example, of two Irish writers whose work he has recently encountered. Seeing Fiona Shaw in the current London production of Samuel Beckett's Happy Daysreminded him, he says, that "you don't realise how much you've been influenced". He encountered Beckett when he was a teenager trying to get away from the avocado farm in California where he grew up to be an actor in New York.
"Beckett is what caused me to start writing. I was messing around with acting and writing some fiction, back in 1961 I think, when somebody gave me Waiting for Godotand then Endgame. I'd never heard of Beckett. I remember very distinctly the confrontation with the script was something that overwhelmed me, I'd never seen anything like this. I hadn't realised you could do that sort of thing. That's the thing about Beckett that's so extraordinary. Not that you want to write like him (because nobody can) but that what he does is to offer up an entirely new perspective: You can do anything.
"To tell you the truth, I remember walking into bookstores back then and trying to find contemporary theatre, and contemporary theatre was O'Neill, Miller, Albee, Chekhov, Tennessee Williams - there's gotta be something more modern than that. Not to take anything away from any one of them - they were all particularly great in their time and still are - but it just struck me that nothing was being done in America comparable to what was being done in Europe, and particularly by Beckett. It wasn't naturalism and naturalism didn't seem to satisfy the impulses of the time, which were pretty chaotic, and the anger that was happening. So I thought, why not try to do that and at the same time stay with what you know, stay on an American terrain? It fired me up to take the American idiom and fool with it in a theatrical sense."
FORTY-FIVE YEARS ON, when his application of that European sensibility to a distinctively American terrain has produced some of the greatest plays in the language, Shepard is still capable of being struck by the same lightening. His newest discovery is another Irish dramatist, Tom Murphy. "I didn't come across A Whistle in the Darkuntil quite recently and I was just knocked out by it. I couldn't believe that I hadn't come across this thing before. And I started studying it, to re-read it and re-read it and see what it was exactly that made it work so well. And I discovered, after studying it methodically, that it has to do with movement. It's that the play never stops moving, it's in motion the whole time, it's beautiful, it's like a tapestry. That in itself was an inspiration. It's like if you're a musician and you hear somebody playing and you go 'What is that? How did you do that?' Musicians are always borrowing from each other, it's very much an eclectic bag, and so it is with writing, people are constantly sniffing around, taking things. Not stealing, just sharing."
The influences go both ways, of course. Martin MacDonagh's The Lonesome Westbears the marks of Shepard's True West, and Shepard is happy to have helped. "He wrote me a kind of apologetic letter once. It was very funny, something about referencing True West. I haven't seen The Lonesome Westbut I love his work. He's an absolutely extraordinary playwright. And these things are bound to pop up more than once. The idea of conflicts between brothers goes back to Cain and Abel."
Conversely, Shepard is happy to acknowledge the influence of two Irish writers on his own play The Late Henry Moss.The title, and a crucial part of the plot, comes from Frank O'Connor's short story The Late Henry Conran. "I lifted that thing out of there, where the man is in jail and is publicised as being dead by his wife. It's a fabulous story. I just lifted that notion - I hadn't ever done that before but it's directly out of it." He also drew for the play from The Playboy of the Western World: "the idea of the corpse. The dead one coming alive."
These literary connections are part of the reason Shepard feels so comfortable about his new - again utterly American - play having its premiere in Ireland. The single protagonist of Kicking a Dead Horseis, like so many of Shepard's characters, obsessed by the search for an elusive authenticity. Shepard himself admits to feeling something of the same tug in relation to Ireland.
"The thing with Ireland is of course the language, and the ancient aspect of it. It's not like America, where we go back to the 1600s and then get lost in the mist, here 1600 is nothing. There's the Golden Bough sense - the thing of the druids, the Celts, the mystery of the language and how powerful that is, and how it's had an effect on America. Still does - the Scotch-Irish in Appalachia and all the rest of it. It still plays a very strong part in the backbone of that part of the world. That's where my affinity with it is: because in the States we've lost so much contact with our own past. You talk to kids about the civil war, they don't know what you're talking about. This notion, this implication, that we're connected to something ancient - it's good for a writer to feel that there's some connection to something very, very old. And that there's a continuation. It's a tribal thing."
In the US, as in Kicking a Dead Horse, the search for authenticity often centres on the image of the cowboy. Hobart Struther, the play's sixtysomething protagonist made his fortune collecting western art and now wants to live out that cowboy mythology for himself. I reminded Shepard of a line in an old poem by his one-time lover Patti Smith, called Sam Shepard: 9 Random Years: "he was a man playing cowboys". Is the play in this sense autobiographical? "Oh sure", he laughs, "It's all autobiographical. Just there's a lot of masking going on."
DOES HE FEEL that cowboy impulse himself on the ranch in Kentucky where he does much of his writing? "Oh of course. Everybody in America wants to be a cowboy and very few know what it's like to be one. It's not romantic, when you're out there castrating cattle and getting blood all over your hands, mending barbed wire and doctoring cows. It's hard, hard work and the guys who still are ranch hands in Montana or west Texas, they're a rare breed now. You would never seem 'em in front of a TV camera. But it is quite shocking, you're in a place outside Tuscon or somewhere and these guys walk in for a cup of coffee, with the high-heeled boots and the big rowel spurs and the chink chaps and blood all over 'em, sit down, never take their hat off. These guys are from out there. Then they get back in the truck and they just vanish, you know? I doubt any of the guys who dream about it would imagine that's what it's like. I grew up in it and was around it. I grew up with these guys. I rodeo-ed a little bit and played around with it, but never to the point where I had to survive by it."
There is, of course, a political dimension to this fantasy, and George Bush tapped into it. Shepard is wary of anyone seeing the new play as a political treatise and his stage directions have a wonderfully deadpan warning against overly metaphorical readings of its would-be cowboy and his eponymous expired equine: "The dead horse should be as realistic as possible . . . In fact, it should actually be a dead horse." But the play's frantic comedy is undoubtedly informed by Bush and the Iraq war.
"His actions certainly bear on the play, this notion that the West wasn't enough to conquer, now we have to conquer the rest of the world, and we're going to continue this Manifest Destiny - what, in Iraq? That certainly is part of what feeds it, but I'm not trying to make a tract about it. There is this strange deal - from Lewis and Clark [ who first explored the American West] to Iraq. It's very weird that we're continually trying to devour territory. It was about territory and it still is about territory, and ownership, and imperialism and conquering - taking it and doing something with it that we consider to be more useful than what's being done with it now. And consequently creating havoc and devastation. It's frightening, absolutely frightening."
In a sense, almost all of Shepard's work is about this restlessness and the psychic vacuums it creates. "I'm interested in the impulses behind it. I do think that they're connected, that there's a history of this devouring, this possessive attitude. Thomas Jefferson and those guys were southern planters. Planters were guys who needed land and the quest to get to the West was really to get more land - let's get it before the Russians and the English and the French. It looks very innocent - what a glorious thing to make the continent one country. But it also has to do with this taking over, grabbing, getting hold of it. You have to go through several Indian tribes, you have to kill quite a few people. From those impulses, this whole thing was born. Bush didn't happen out of thin air."
IF THESE HISTORICAL and political resonances are never far away from Shepard's work, though, it endures because they are always rooted in the family. He remains mistrustful of theorising and convinced that in the theatre, everything stems from experience. "There's a dangerous thing where you uncover something and then it becomes a theme and it loses its sting, its power. What makes something like A Whistle in the Darkso wonderful is that these characters feel like they're coming from life. You can't write something like that without having it come from your connections to family. Father, mother, brothers, sisters - you can't really cut yourself off from that. Why would you want to? Because family is the real heart and soul of what you're about as a writer. What it becomes, how it unravels, is part of your craftsmanship, but if you cut yourself off from it, all that's dead.
Even in Beckett, even though these characters seem to be existing in a kind of timeless netherworld, the mother's there, the father's there, the lovers are there, all of the relationships are very much coming from someone's direct experience. It's not about philosophy, it's not about esoteric existential sh*t.Happy Days is about Willie and Winnie and the dilapidation of their relationship. That human aspect is what makes the play work. There's nothing abstract about it." Shepard's gift is that nothing in his work, even a dead horse, is ever abstract either.
Kicking a Dead Horse runs at the Abbey Theatre from March 15 to April 14, with previews from March 12-14.
American Voices: Sam Shepard reads from his works of fiction on Thursday March 8th at 6.30pm at the Abbey.
Meet The Makers: Brien Vahey, artist and set designer of A Number and Kicking a Dead Horse talks about his design process from page to stage on Tuesday March 27th at 6.45pm at the Peacock. Admission to both events is free but booking is essential. Tel: 01-8787222