The Independent: My Brother the Weirdo
As the coffee-loving FBI agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks, Kyle MacLachlan sought out, and eventually confronted, his nemesis, Bob - as close to an incarnation of evil as has ever appeared on the television screen. In this new two-hander by John Kolvenbach, MacLachlan has crossed the country to seek out his nemesis - again in the form of Bob. Except this Bob is his brother, he hasn't seen him for 23 years, and he is a charming, harmless weirdo with serious obsessive-compulsive tendencies - the sort who cuts clippings out of newspapers about unidentified bodies in case one of them turns out to be him. Played by Woody Harrelson, he's the sort of guy you pay a fiver to trim your hedge or clear the snow off your path. Except when the latest good citizen offered him "$20 to clean his bathroom", Bob pushed him out of his car. The car was doing 50 mph at the time, the good citizen's neck was broken, and Bob is facing prison. This is one of those American plays where there's a whole lot of talk about the past but little moves forward in the present, and the characters' journeys are brief and circular. There are revelations aplenty, and a fantastic, eye-watering running gag about a fridge, yet the scanty here- and-now plot is (strangely in such a modernistic play) exceptionally melodramatic, even a touch far-fetched. It would be wrong of me to give too much away, but suffice it to say that the sandwich bag with which MacLachlan first enters contains no ham-on-rye, and any dramatist of a previous generation would have simply hung it on the wall and been done with it. But this is, like so many of these American plays, an actors' piece. And these two act their socks off. Harrelson's performance as Bob is magnificent, rambling and ranting, talking nonsense and making it sound credible, jiggling and trouser-pulling, avoiding cliche but implicitly conceding that weirdos can be a bit predictable. His tirade about the jurymen at his trial - "freaks and morons and postal clerks" - is little more than we have all wanted to say about those who have opposed us. Of course, none of this verbal diarrhoea fools his brother. But MacLachlan is still left playing Wise to his Morecambe, stuck with asking the "do people know what you're saying?" questions at the end of each of Harrelson's flights of mania. In John Crowley's production there isn't a single non-naturalistic moment, apart from the gun business (dammit, I've gone and given it away). But ultimately the easy naturalism of the dialogue militates against the drama and packs a genuinely powerful punch. At the end we are left with a wholly believable and quietly tragic outcome, and yet it is somehow undemanding and unsurprising. To 27 October (020-7369 1731). A version of this review appeared in some editions of Thursday's paper - Jonathan Myerson, The Independent (London), 2002-08-13 COPYRIGHT 2002 Independent Newspapers (UK) Ltd.