I did Tooth of Crime, Geography of a Horse Dreamer, and Little Ocean at the Hampstead. Everybody was incredibly generous toward me, which surprised me. Maybe it was the notion of American avant-garde, or whatever you want to call it I don’t know There was a strange kind of envy about America. I’d really exhausted it and I’d been living on the streets too much A lot of stuff was just frayed I needed to get into another environment It was kind of an escape.

When I got there, I wrote Tooth of Crime, in Shepherd’s Bush actually, trying to find shillings to put into the heater. At the end of Geography of a Horse Dreamer, they put on the Cajun music, and he has to be back with that The cowboys burst in and say, ‘We’ve come for our brother’. Cody feels creatively constricted by his environment: that’s why he has to burst out and go home.”n The Sam Shepard Festival is at BAC from 2-20 July. Bookings: 0171-223- 2223SAM SHEPARD ON WHY HE CAME TO LONDON”I’d exhausted whatever it was I was doing in New York. Nancy Meckler, a director Shepard instinctively trusted, staged Action at the Theatre Upstairs that September, and Rea was in that, too And then, aged 30, he left “He’s an American,” says Rea “He had to be close to his source. Because I was seven-months pregnant, I couldn’t really do anything, and Olan couldn’t really work in this country One day he said, ‘I’ll write something for you’ So we all held our breath, crossed our fingers, and waited. It was extraordinary: it was written by a man, but it didn’t feel like that.” At Shepard’s suggestion, Rea directed because “it seemed part of the nature of him writing the play for these women that it should be done by someone who was around”.Shepard wasn’t around for much longer.

“His wife, Olan, who’d had a baby; me, who was about to have a baby, and Caroline [Hutchinson, Rea's then girlfriend], who hadn’t had a baby. All the actors shelved their ego because they knew it wouldn’t wash.” The shame is that this landmark production ran to studio audiences for only three weeks. At least the play has enjoyed an after-life.Little Ocean, a short play about pregnancy, ran briefly late at night a month later at the Hampstead Theatre (the author’s local – he lived just off the Heath), and has never been seen since “He wrote it about three women,”says Dinah Stabb. At that point I thought, you really are taking this very seriously.”In rehearsals, contrary to convention, they ran straight through the play from very early on “There was no messing about,” says Rea “There was no directorial ego going on. (In London, Shepard couldn’t indulge his obsession with horses, but he co-owned a greyhound, wishfully named Crazy Horse, and raced it at White City and Harringay.)The cast of Rea, Bob Hoskins and Kenneth Cranham, who went down the dogs with their director, was augmented by a non-actor who was cast solely on account of his vast bulk.

“It made enormous demands on Sam,” recalls Wright, “that he had to coach this elderly guy through a speech that he showed no signs of ever getting to know, and Sam was terribly patient. Geography of a Horse Dreamer was an exercise in submerged autobiography about a man called Cody kidnapped by betting racketeers because his dreams predict horse-race winners. His powers shrink as he dreams dog winners, then mutates into a dog himself. Although he was part of the world of the Royal Court, he never seemed to be of it.”The Royal Court’s nascent Theatre Upstairs was among the first theatres to get its fix of Shepard Its third ever production was La Turista in 1969. The King’s Head took up the baton with Chicago, Red Cross and The Holy Ghostly, all lunchtime one-acters in which Shepard had no direct involvement. Charles Marowitz premiered Tooth of Crime at the Open Space, a qualified success starring Richard O’Brien as a young pretender ousting a reigning rock monarch.But from this distance it looks as if London was missing its opportunity, and it is possible that Shepard sensed it himself when he asked Wright if he could direct a play commissioned from him by the Court.