Digging the dirt down on Misery Farm...Buried Child is a horrid play well acted, says QUENTIN LETTS 

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 Buried Child (Trafalgar Studios)

Rating:

The Little Matchgirl (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)  

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Hollywood actor Ed Harris plays a drunken, immobile malcontent in a nihilistic tragedy about rural America.

Mr Harris is skillful, his resonant voice and craggy face helping to convey a strong idea of an irascible old redneck. Some of the show’s support acting is also worth a glance.

I wish I could say the same about Sam Shepard’s play, a loathsome offering which manages to be both thuddingly allegorical and pretentiously cryptic.

Dodge (Mr Harris) is a retired Illinois farmer almost gnawed away by loathing and some evil secret. Only slowly do we gather that there has been a child death in the family and that the poor mite may be buried out back, under the soil which Dodge claims has lost all its goodness.

While the ill-named Dodge spends his days unable to budge from a grotty sofa where he swigs hooch and watches baseball on a portable television, his wife (Amy Madigan) swans off to see her fancyman, the local clergyman.

Ed Harris plays Dodge (left), who spends his days unable to budge from a 'grotty' sofa, while Barnaby Kay plays Tilden (right), a 'disgraced halfwit'

The whole show is set in a run-down front room, drably decorated in Derek McLane’s design.

For company, Dodge has to rely on two simpleton sons. One of these (Gary Shelford) is an amputee who accidentally lopped off his left leg with a chainsaw and now has a fetish for shearing his father’s scabby head.

The other (Barnaby Kay) is a disgraced halfwit who keeps harvesting armfuls of unwanted vegetables from that spooky back yard.

In due course Dodge’s grandson (handsome Jeremy Irvine) turns up with his spirited Californian girlfriend (Charlotte Hope).

The family pretends not to recognise this grandson, though he seems a perfectly normal lad. Mr Shepard, unwilling to tolerate happiness, ensures that he does not remain normal for long.

Throw in some set-smashing violence, incest, clerical hypocrisy, sexual molestation, gloomy lighting, an intermittent soundtrack of allegedly incessant rain, dripping ceilings, bare floorboards, tattoos, occasional cocktail-bar music, horsing about with the amputee’s wooden leg and finally the arrival of a baby’s half-decomposed skeleton which looks a little like ET.

Jeremy Irvine plays Vince (left), Dodge’s grandson, and Shelly (right) is played by Charlotte Hope

The whole thing lasts almost three hours but there are two intervals, so even with the Trafalgar Studios’ claustrophobic seating rows — this is, by some measure, the most unpleasant theatre in the West End — you have opportunities to leg it for freedom, if you will permit the expression ‘leg’ in these circumstances.

First seen in 1978, when Jimmy Carter’s U.S. was struggling to be cheerful, Buried Child is seen as a negative comment on the American dream.

You do not have to be a genius to spot that Dodge and family are meant to represent post-Vietnam America in decline. Seen today, I suppose it may be construed as comment on the hillbillies who — we are told — just voted for Donald Trump.

Instead I discerned an arrogant, exaggerated dismissal of white working-class Americans, a most illiberal slander.

Mr Shepard also reaches for some sort of ancestral gravitas in his message — there is stuff about how these folk have farming and failure ‘in their blood’ — and maybe a cod-Celtic significance in the dead baby buried outside in the family potato patch.

Oh spare us.

At Shakespeare's Globe, the board recently gave newish artistic director Emma Rice the heave-ho, but the departure is not immediate.

Her latest show, a retelling of Hans Christian Andersen stories, has just opened at the Globe’s indoor, candlelit Sam Wanamaker house. It again shows what an entrancing talent Miss Rice is.

The Little Matchgirl is that tale of a doomed street child who lights her last few matches, each flame bringing another blessed vision.

The girl is portrayed here by a puppet — a judicious decision, for if a real child played her, it might all become too emotive.

In her folksy-fey manner, commendably English and agreeably unstuffy, director Rice stages stories such as Thumbelina, The Emperor’s New Clothes and the Princess And The Pea.

The Little Matchgirl is that tale of a doomed street child who lights her last few matches, each flame bringing another blessed vision

Simple guitar, oud and double bass music, accompanied by swirling voices, helps to create a magical air.

The costumes are fantastical, evoking the nursery toy cupboard. At the preview, Paul Hunter was on fine form as narrator Ole Shuteye.

But is this a reliable Christmas family show? Well, the plots are fairytales but the humour is wry in quite an adult way and the closing two scenes take a political tone about showing charity towards homeless unfortunates.

In the more powerful of these, the Matchgirl’s limp corpse is eerily reminiscent of Alan Kurdi, the tiny boy washed up dead on a Turkish beach last year.

Miss Rice introduces small bursts of electronic sound and electric lighting — an example of how she has fought to escape the cod-medieval limitations of the Globe.

Dramatically, this show is boxed in by the requirement to use candles for illumination.

I suppose the Globe’s board were foolish ever to appoint such an inventive director but it does seem a shame that the big-hearted Miss Rice will soon leave. She has brought quirkiness to the South Bank. It needed it.