Studio III Fool for Love

The Love&Madness ensemble's decision to build its new rep season around the talents of Sadie Frost may seem optimistic, but you've got to give her some credit with regards to Neil Sheppeck's revival of Sam Shepard's 1983 melodrama. Not for her acting: small, shrill and hyperactive, she plays the ruined May like a petulant child, not an adult whose entire life has been poisoned by her passion for half-brother Eddie. But Frost did come up with the idea of Carl Bar‚t - Pete Doherty's less preposterous Libertines partner- for the Eddie role. He's surprisingly decent, all rangy charisma, glib but dangerous. Yet that doesn't cut it for a text that demands virtuosity. The play's climax comes as May and Eddie reveal the nature of their relationship to May's hapless beau Martin, the blustery spectre of their father roaring in the background all the while. The sequence must be an emotional tour de force. Gerald McDermott is impressively elemental as the father, but the two leads don't have the chops: when McDermott clams up, the production fizzles out.