New plays by Sam Shepard still have an enticing cachet, so this British premiere — first seen at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and then in New York — is something of a coup for the Almeida, not least because Shepard himself occupies the director’s chair.

Kicking a Dead Horse stars that fine, hangdog actor Stephen Rea as Manhattan art dealer Hobart Struther who, tired of selling romantic pictures of the American West at a huge mark-up, has embarked on a horseback journey of self-discovery in the desert. Unfortunately, his horse dies, and the play sees Struther discussing his life as he tries and repeatedly fails to tip its huge corpse into a too-small grave. Symbolism, anyone?
Critics of the American production noted the debt that this blackly comic, Sisyphean image owed to Samuel Beckett. Yet it also represents a continuation of the author’s own preoccupations, and possibly a comment upon them.

Shepard’s work is riddled with cowboy imagery and often concerned with “authenticity” and the ways in which American reality — especially American masculinity — falls short of its abiding myths.
Like the brothers in True West, and the similar siblings in The Late Henry Moss — the last Shepard play premiered at the Almeida, in 2006 — Hobart is torn between trying to dig the truth out about himself, or simply bury it. Here, there is even a recurrence of that other Shepard staple, the sultry woman in a slip familiar from works like Fool for Love.

The title of Kicking a Dead Horse, though, may have more personal relevance for Shepard. Does he feel that he, like America, is burdened by myth? Is he tired of kicking over the same old themes, again and again? Does he feel that nobody is listening to his diagnoses of American sickness?
There are just 16 performances at the Almeida to give us a chance to find out.

From tonight until 20 September. Information: 020 7359 4404, www.almedia.co.uk.