Jealous Juliette is electric

Hollywood film stars often fizzle out when they venture on the West End stage, but between them Juliette Lewis and Martin Henderson generated enough sexual electricity to set Shaftesbury Avenue throbbing. They never go further than deep embracing but you cannot miss the charge of eros.

The attractive pair are caught up in Sam Shepard's enthralling Fool For Love, which is set somewhere between a reverie and a real-life location, or to be more precise in a very low-rent motel room on the edge of the Mojave desert. With its dilapidated, down-at-several heels tackiness, its glint of neon lights and glimpse of desert, Bunny Christie's wonderful design creates just the right mood of vivid seediness.

Miss Lewis's May, wild and vulnerable, all long-limbed and lean, with a bare midriff and hair that looks as if it has been left out in the sun far too long, sits on a chair and clings to the knees of Henderson's bearded Eddie, as if he were a lifebuoy rather than a man who has disappeared far more than he has arrived in her world. The latest episode in an obsessive love affair, coloured by jealousy and anger, violence and mutual need, is running its familiar, recriminating course.

To say this may make Fool For Love sound like a familiar voyage into the sex and suffering terrain, where Tennessee Williams placed so many of his lonesome, desperate heroines. Shepard's perspectives, though, are different - dreamier and occasionally drug-laden. Larry Lamb's compelling Old Man sits at a far corner of the room. When he speaks about a relationship and a catastrophe that binds him, May and Eddie in close family bondage, Shepard intends we should think him brought to life by the imaginations of May and Eddie.

Premiered in 1983 and last seen here at the Donmar 10 years ago, the 80-minute long Fool For Love, marked by flashes of poetry and black comedy, is reminiscent in tone and theme of classic Greek tragedy and Eugene O'Neill.

It belongs to a sequence of Shepard plays about American family-life, with murder, mania, alcoholism and forbidden sexual relations its addictions.

Shepard's idea is to demonstrate how and why these lovers are caught in a cycle of mutual abuse and symbiotic need. Eddie has arrived on a visit out of the blue and May, changing into a scarlet dress, expects a gentleman caller who duly arrives in the cowed form of Joe Duttine's Martin. This embarrassed visitor becomes a kind of prisoner, involved in the furious reunion, witness to the outburst of revelations which help explain what binds these lost lovers together.

Miss Lewis, as changeable as April weather, makes a terrific May. By turns furious, rejecting and sexually desiring, she acts her despairing, jealous heart out.

Henderson is just as remarkable. His charismatic, macho Eddie, a natural-born liar and soother of distraught, jealous women, has more than an edge of menace and obsessiveness about him as he wanders around the room literally lassoing odd objects and metaphorically May herself, whom he so regularly deserts.

Lindsay Posner's superb production screws the tension to the tightest point and creates an atmosphere of dream-struck strangeness that is true to Shepard's haunting, nightmare vision of what passes for American family life in some of its darker regions.

Food Of Love
Cert: cert12