A real, gritty, on-the-ranch cowboy who has mostly lived in New York, London and now Virginia. He was once associated with Patti Smith, the dangerous, punkish singer, but now it’s Jessica Lange, the Hollywood star. But then again, what does any of that matter? It’s the soul of the wild, untamed West that counts for his audiences and for many, he seems to hold the patent on that. By the mid-Sixties, the days of Soldier Blue, everyone knew that the old fringed-pants-and-lasso image was dead. A cowboy could no longer be the gunslinger who knew that the only good Indian was a.. you weren’t even allowed to call them Indians any more. But that doesn’t mean that there weren’t plenty of (mostly urban) Americans who wanted to find new ways of discovering themselves in the wildness of the West.Enter tall, rangy cowboy types who grew up on farms 40 miles east of LA. Shepard’s first play was actually called Cowboys and one of his greatest successes is True West, which charts the battle between Lee, a Hollywood scriptwriter and Austin, his drifting cowboyish brother.

In the struggle to successfully pitch to the producer – Austin’s clich?owboy story or Lee’s love story – the outcome is inevitable.And then there’s Harry Dean Stanton staggering across the cactus plains of Paris, Texas, one of Shepard’s more memorably undramatic screenplays. Or there’s Chuck Yeager, played by Shepard in The Right Stuff, a test-pilot pushing the envelope of jet flight – taming the untamable, as the white man did in the Wild West of old. And being totally laconic and straw-chewing with it.If there’s one quality that all Shepard’s characters seem to embody, it’s this refusal to accept the rules of ordinary life, the constraints of domestic civility. Even Shooter, our fish gutter, breaks off from the meal to periodically smash chairs to splinters (the same rules apply: don’t ask why.)But apart from the cowboy spirit, who are Shepard’s characters? I remember moments, I remember coups de th?re, but I don’t remember true All My Sons/”kindness of strangers”/”could have been a contender”-type dilemmas. Is this why he is so unnervingly unmemorable? Michael Smith complains that when he first read Icarus’s Mother he ” couldn’t tell the characters apart”. Once into rehearsals, he admits: “Tardily, we got to work on character. It turned out that the characters are perfectly distinct, it’s just that we’re given almost no information about them.” Can this ever be the basis of a good play?Shepard himself is happy to admit: “I preferred a character that was constantly unidentifiable, shifting through the actor, so that the actor could almost play anything, and the audience was never expected to identify with the character.”All this makes the plays immensely attractive to actors, and even more attractive to directors wanting to make their very own mark with a tasty revival.

It almost certainly explains the current presence of two old Shepards in London studio theatres. But do audiences really want these super-cool, style-as-drama moments? You can make up your own minds, but see how much you remember after a fortnight, a month, and then decide. And it needs to be more than a whiff of Billingsgate.Sam Shepard’s ‘Action’ opens at the Young Vic Studio tonight (020-7928 6363); ‘A Lie of the Mind’ is at the Donmar Warehouse to 1 Sept (020-7369 1732). This isn’t so much a play as an employment bureau. With 33 parts (played here by 26 actors), The Relapse offers almost as many opportunities for comic distinction, with its conmen, climbers, randy widows and saucy servants, its masquerading, duelling and ravishing. Over three-and-a-half hours, however, this play of 1696 shows that, pace Mae West, too much of a good thing can be indigestible.The directors Trevor Nunn and Stephen Rayne started out with a handicap in the form of the Olivier Theatre, which nearly always seems too big for whatever is performed in it, and is especially outsize for this frothy, gossipy play.