Sixty-six year old veteran actor Ed Harris has made his London stage debut in Sam Shephard’s 1978 Pulitzer Prize winning weird-as-hell family drama BURIED CHILD at the Trafalgar Studios after its successful New York run earlier this year. Directed by Scott Elliot, this ‘impressively unsettling revival’ opened last night for a 14 week engagement.
While he known for his large body of screen work, resulting in multiple Oscar nominations and winning a Golden Globe and SAG awards, Ed began his acting career on the stage. In 1986 he received a Best Actor Tony nomination for his performance in George Furth’s PRECIOUS SONS.
Ed plays Dodge, a septuagenarian Illinois patriarch wedded to his sofa. In his Guardian review Michael Billington called the production “brutally compelling” and “Harris’s impressive as a whiskey-soaked old wreck in Shepard’s gothic story of loveless inertia and poisonous guilt in a dysfunctional family.” He is joined on stage by his wife Amy Madigan. Ed signed my sketch at the stage door during previews a couple of weeks ago.