Published in the Irish Independent, March 2007
The US is kicking a dead horse in Iraq, the outcome of a misconceived adventure that was supposed to be about taming the wild. Their only hope for retaining some dignity is to bury the bodies and get out as quickly as possible. This could be what the renowned American playwright, Sam Shepard, is talking about in his enigmatic new play, written for the Abbey, ‘Kicking A Dead Horse’.
Stephen Rea plays Hobart Struther, a beaten-down American who has fled his bourgeois, Park Avenue, art-dealing life for a long trek across the prairies, in search of his former self.
A day into his trek, his horse keels over, and this is how we encounter Hobart: stuck in the wilderness, kicking his dead horse. (The horse is pretty lifelike, and the desert setting is elegantly captured by Brien Vahey’s set and John Comiskey’s lighting.)
Shoulders hunched and eyes, as ever, drooping, Stephen Rea plays Hobart as a weary, bemused refugee from American materialism, a man who, as he found his fortune, lost his sense of himself. He is more pathetic than tragic, and yet Rea ennobles him with a sense of yearning and a restless energy that is, quietly, captivating. Hobart’s task is to bury his horse, but he is defeated by the size and awkwardness of the stiffened corpse, which he can’t fit into the grave he has dug. So he kicks, and talks to himself, and soliloquises, and swears at his horse, and kicks again.
If the setting is absurd, the writing is razor sharp. This short play may or may not be an allegory for the war in Iraq, but it is certainly (also) about the alienation of urban man, the search for authenticity, love, the place of art and, in part, the role of the theatre.
There are no polemics: these themes are treated elliptically, in Hobart’s lonesome ruminations. There’s no momentous climax or standing ovation; instead a witty, enigmatic ending and an appreciative audience asking each other, ‘but what exactly did it mean?’ Shepard and Rea give us an intriguing tale of modern America: what it means may be up to you.