It should come as no great surprise that Sam Shepard, whose plays often describe how the great American dream has given way to all manner of nightmare, should now be moving into Samuel Beckett territory.

I suspect this broody, 70-minute solo piece, whose impact is blunted by the pervading glumness of Stephen Rea’s performance, enjoys spiritual and thematic links with Beckett’s masterpiece, Happy Days. In that extraordinary, virtual monologue, with its heroine, Winnie, eventually trapped up to her neck in sand, you sense that not only one life but perhaps the whole world is drawing to a close.

Shepard’s Kicking a Dead horse, recently premiered in Dublin and just seen in New York, does not go that far but the reverberating Beckettian echoes and affinities proliferate. Designer Brien Vahey summons up wild west prairie badlands, where nothing grows but silence. Sheets are whipped away from undulating mounds to reveal a life-like but very dead horse, lying on its side.

Then Stephen’s Rea’s Hobart Struther, a 65‑year-old art dealer in a Stetson, stranded in nowhere’s midst, hauls himself out of a pit, from which he has been shoveling earth and into which he is weirdly obsessed that his horse should be tipped. Realism’s boundaries are now set to be breached.

Talking in rather Beckettian style to himself, as if that self was another person, Hobart scans the empty horizon through his binoculars and launches himself on a reminiscent, stream of self-consciousness. He has left his wife. From his Park Avenue he has hurled invaluable works of art, discovered in saloons and barns.He is crazily intent upon this voyage of self‑discovery, or “authenticity” as he puts it, a task that involves facing up to a lifetime’s regrets.

Rea, in Shepard’s muted but ultimately romantic production, relishes Hobart’s jovial cynicism, his emphatic bravado, his struggles to move the horse to its grave. The limited, dramatic tension, though, is dependent on a strong sub-textual sense that Hobart becomes increasingly possessed by fear, grief and alienation, as he faces up to “me and myself”.It is these moods that an obstinately phlegmatic Rea quite fails to evoke. John Comiskey’s atmospheric lighting design injects flickers of excitement into a Shepard play that for once fails to grapple with the personal and public issues it raises.
Until 20 September (020 7359 4404).