Last night's dip into the Adelaide Fringe was a testosterone-soaked adventure, packed with rivalrous brothers, bad fathers, bewildered or dead mothers, homoeroticism and the spice of criminal behaviour. And it's fair to say the two shows I saw covered the entire spectrum of artistic quality, from heart-lifting excellence to the kind of direness that briefly delivers you into the full-blown existential anguish of miserable boredom. But I o'erleap myself. First to the excellence.

Flying Penguin's production of Sam Shepard's 1980 masterwork, True West, well rewards the two hours relentless concentration it demands. It's a great play, but like a lot of great plays, rarely done - this is the first time I've seen it on stage. I sometimes wonder why Australian companies seem to behave as if there are about a dozen plays in the canon - excluding Shakespeare, of course, whose ubiquity is such that he doesn't count. Shepard is a writer it would be good to see more of, and True West shows us why: his plays are lawless, literate, intelligent and superbly theatrical. Their dramaturgical roots are in writers like Beckett, Pinter and Pirandello, but these influences are habituated to a uniquely American psychology and dialect, the slang of rock'n'roll and trash culture. A serious study of Shepard's oeuvre would teach budding playwrights far more than any number of workshops.

Like much of his early work - A Lie of the Mind, Buried Child - True West explores the American mythos through a drama of the violently dysfunctional family, but here the action is lean and spare. The title is taken ironically from a pulp magazine specialising in Westerns, and part of its driving obsession is the ambiguity of "truth" - what, after all, is a "true story"? It's basically a two-hander, the bulk of the play consisting of dialogues between estranged brothers Austin (Renato Musolino) and Lee (Nick Garsden), who reunite in their mother's suburban LA home. Austin is a screen writer about to sign a deal with producer Saul (Geoff Revell), and is house-minding while his Mom (Chrissie Page) visits Alaska; Lee is a drifter and part-time burglar.

At first their characters are an exercise in contrast, but as the play progresses their roles reverse to show how each brother is a complex mirror of the other's frustrated desires. Austin, the materially well-off Ivy League graduate, loses his film deal when Lee's crazy evocation of a contemporary trucker western (which sounds something like Stephen Speilberg's Duel, with added horses) attracts Saul's attention. A yearning for an authentic connection with the land - Lee's walkabouts in the Mojava Desert - is contrasted with the meretricious desire expressed in movies, but in Shepard's mirror these extremes collapse into each other as differing expressions of the same yearning, the spiritual emptiness inside the soul of post-war America.

David Mealor's production reflects the play's lean aesthetic: Kathryn Sproul's contained kitchen-sink set, simply and effectively lit by Mark Pennington, is enclosed in the larger space of the theatre, emphasising its theatricality and artifice. The action is backed by Cameron and Tristan Goodall's Paris Texas-style electric guitar and folksy electric banjo, which generate long haunting growls against the crickets and barking dogs of Chris Petridis's sound design.

Part of Shepard's skill is how he unlocks anarchic extremes in a text that appears to be a naturalistic, real-time play, making his kitchen-sink play (yes, there is a sink) behave in ways more akin to absurdist drama. It permits a histrionic extremity in the performances which all four actors exploit, generating powerful and highly theatrical performances. At various points I wondered about the almost mannered acting, but like the dialogue of Tennessee Williams, this reflects a similar artifice in the writing, and it's well modulated. As the brothers, Garsden and Musolino go for it, get it and bring it home. The performances are delivered with total and compelling commitment, revealing both Shepard's grotesque comedy and his ability to open the aching voids in his characters.

After that, retrospective wisdom tells me that I should have gone home. But duty drove me on to see Bully, an hour-long monologue in rhyming verse by British import Richard Fry. This show inexplicably generated four-star raves at the Edinburgh Fringe: maybe you had to be there, maybe fear of being thought homophobic or classist strangles all criticism. I don't know. Fry details a cycle of domestic violence intensified by the narrator's experience of homophobia. Every hard luck detail is there: the violent father, the homophobic brother, the dead mother, the bullying at school, the abusive relationship that ends in tragedy. The endless cycle of violence, he warns us, will affect us all!

The monologue reminded me of nothing so much as those prolix Victorian poems that end with Little Johnny remorsefully facing the hangman after his Rake's Progress through life's ordeals: it's certainly as trite in its moralising, although the Victorian versions were better scanned. As a performer, Fry has two speeds: teary-eyed silence (real tears!), and a manic grin as he recalls happy moments in his tragic life. After half an hour Bully becomes unbearable; the unconscious misogyny is almost worse than the relentless sentimentality or the head-thunking rhymes. It's certainly delivered with sincerity, but there's barely an ounce of insight that might make the hour well-spent. Very high on the arrrgh-metre for this little crrritic.

True West by Sam Shepard, directed by David Mealor. Design by Kathryn Sproul, lighting by Mark Pennington, sound design by Chris Petridis, composition by Cameron Goodall and Tristan Goodall. With Renato Musolino, Nick Garsden, Geoff Revell and Chrissie Page. Flying Penguin Productions @ Adelaide Centre for the Arts until March 14.


Bully, written and performed by Richard Fry. The Centre for International Theatre @ Higher Ground Art Base until March 14.