The playwright in question is now the late Sam Shepard; this production of his 1980 drama (amazingly, its first outing in a full-scale West End venue) opens a few days after a one-off tribute compilation in his memory was presented at the Royal Court, and coincidentally in the same month that a Broadway revival of the same play, starring Ethan Hawke, begins previews. However, for the vast majority who are unfamiliar with Shepard’s status as the poet of the haunting decline of the American West, the principal box-office draw here is Kit Harington, alias Jon Snow off of Game Of Thrones.

I was distinctly underwhelmed by Harington’s last stage outing a couple of years ago in the title role of a gimmicky Doctor Faustus. He does much better here as insecure, agitated screenwriter Austin, who has retired to his mother’s home in the suburban former desert of southern California to bash out his latest project but is upset by the arrival of his brash, needling petty-criminal brother Lee.

In the first phase of the play, Harington keeps Austin tightly bottled, even to the point of slight monotony. However, you can spot the precise moment when his cork pops and he starts foaming all over the carpet: it is when he learns that not only has Lee hustled a screen producer into optioning his own story idea, but that this is at the expense of Austin’s planned opus. Bereft of external validation, Austin degenerates until he and Lee have not so much switched places as become complementary facets of the same composite personality. At one point Austin complains that the producer “thinks we’re the same person”, but increasingly, in many ways, they are.

The pairing of Austin and Lee is a much more potent infernal spiral than was the 2016 coupling of Marlowe’s Faustus and Mephistopheles. This is equally due to the performance of Johnny Flynn (Beast, Genius) as Lee, the role that Hawke will take on Broadway. Lee is untrammelled from the first: free to poke, manipulate, threaten and generally annoy the hell out of his brother, and Flynn relishes it.

He and Joe Zeitlin also provide a score which sounds a cross between native American and 1980s Neue Deutsche Welle. Their refusal to go for Ry Cooderesque slide guitar meshes with director Matthew Dunster’s vision of the play’s psychgogeography. It’s precisely that this is not the true west, no matter which brother’s conception we consider. It has been built up and turned into the ’burbs; all we see for the majority of the evening is the tacky period interior of a tract villa, and even when one wall finally flies out to reveal a desertscape behind, it is lit not by a representation of the sun but by a bank of fluorescent orange tubes.

It’s a nicely conceived, sharply executed vision of the play. In the end, though, it falls at the unavoidable fence which lies across so much of Shepard’s most characteristic work: Europeans will always look at the American West from outside, never feel it as a common archetype at our collective core.

Written for the Financial Times.