There is as much to say about the context of this production as there is about the thing itself. Firstly, the previous production of a David Mamet play at this venue, in 2008, was Speed-the-Plow and I still remember it as one of very few times I have been aware of experiencing one of the most thrilling nights of my life, in or outside a theatre.
It starred the now deeply unfashionable Kevin Spacey and the eternally popular Jeff Goldblum as cynical Hollywood producers. Directed by the Old Vic’s recently departed artistic director Matthew Warchus (who took over from Spacey in the job in 2015), the two lead performances delivered a mesmeric display of charisma and comic timing, qualities that are in abundance in this new production of Glengarry Glen Ross.
The play’s name is a fictional developer whose properties a cut-throat of estate agents (to use the collective noun) must each sell if they are to cling on to the top half of the office leader board and keep their jobs.
This is the second time in a year that Patrick Marber, whose production of Mel Brooks’s The Producers has deservedly become a long-runner in the West End, has directed Mamet’s hilarious and horrific dissection of sales culture.
The first was on Broadway with a ridiculously starry cast that included Bob Odenkirk and Kieran Culkin, the actor who won his Oscar for playing Benji Kaplan, the infuriating cousin to Jesse Eisenberg’s David in Eisenberg’s moving Holocaust road trip comedy A Real Pain. Context over.
The big idea here is to cast this traditionally masculine play with women actors. This is not a radical notion. A female-cast Julius Caesar with Harriet Walter’s Brutus was one of the finest I’ve seen. The only surprise here is that Mamet, whose political stance has morphed from progressive pugilist to right-wing reactionary, agreed to such a change.
As with Julius Caesar the novelty soon wears off. What’s left is a gripping play and, while not quite reaching the heights of Spacey and Goldblum, some terrific performances. Set mostly in a Chicago estate agents’ office populated by a sales team who each need to avoid being fired, you could cut the kill-or-be-killed atmosphere with a knife. Though you’d have to extract it from someone’s back first.
Indira Varma is Levene, the old-school salesperson who has lost her mojo. Every gesture of bravado is saturated with desperation. As Levene’s younger, fitter, bolder co-worker Roma, the American actor Rosa Salazar stalks the stage with the single-minded purpose of a clenched fist. Yet somewhere behind the knuckles there is a still a flicker of humanity that makes her the closest thing Levene gets to a friend.
Also outstanding is Dorothea Myer-Bennett who has grown into one of our most commanding stage actors through a series of Jewish-themed plays including Leopoldstadt, Nachtland and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (all directed by Marber). As the much-hated office manager Williamson, Myer-Bennett is pitch perfect in a role around which Mamet’s superbly crafted plot pivots to its devastating conclusion.
No concession has been made to the script to accommodate the new genders of the characters, which may (or may not) have been a condition imposed by Mamet.
Not that it matters. The pronouns simply become part of the lingo with which these tough, desperate and vulnerable humans eviscerate each other.
Glengarry Glen Ross
The Old Vic
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