O Glengarry, where is thy sting? That's likely to be one response to the bewildering Old Vic revival of David Mamet's defining (and remarkable) Glengarry Glen Ross, which I saw in its 1983 National Theatre world premiere production when I first moved to London and have loved ever since. I missed its Broadway incarnation last year, a star vehicle for a then recently-Oscar'ed Kieran Culkin and directed by Patrick Marber, the Tony-winning Englishman whose own plays (Closer, especially) have more than a whiff of Mametian ruthlessness about them.
So there was every reason to see what might happen if this play's all-male dissection of machismo were handed entirely to women. This casting gambit has in fact long been doing the rounds and was once thought to be a likely vehicle for Mamet's onetime actress of choice, Patti LuPone (who, when younger, would have been perfect for it on paper).
But now that I've seen women lobbing verbal hand grenades at one another across 85 minutes (no interval) that seem entirely made-to-order for the male mindset, I'm not sure this approach yields much by way of reward. It's not that women can't be ruthless and venal – have a look at some of the modern-day GOP for confirmation that they certainly can. (Indeed, among Marber's current cast, a blonde-coiffed Niki Wardley, pictured below, could have stepped directly out of Mar-a-Lago.)
But surely they would express themselves differently than that afforded Mamet's feral rat pack. What's more, if you're going to keep the characters male and refuse to change their names – as has been the decision taken this time out – it's rather peculiar to then find one or another in a skirt, or clutching a handbag, while talking about being "the man to sell". The net result suggests six highly accomplished actresses play-acting what amounts to a high-level experiment, and I'm not sure those unfamiliar with the play on this evidence will get the measure of its stature. Too many disconcerting visuals stand in the way.
Structurally, Mamet's work is a marvel of compression: three duologues across the shortest of first acts, followed by a longer second act that tightens the screws on these salesmen desperate for a place on the (here unseen) board. A Cadillac and steak knives await the two who succeed, leaving the others consigned to the capitalist scrap heap in a Chicago-set play about worthless Florida properties (no, not Mar-a-Lago), one of which is referenced in the play's puzzling title.
Not a syllable is wasted on the way to a whiplash finish that against the odds views these characters with a last-gasp gallantry. They're cogs ensnared in a merciless machine that some while ago erased kindness from consideration: these days, they would be blindsided by social media, so thank heavens at least that wasn't around when Mamet was penning his parable of men feeding at the trough like so many pigs.
The roles have been catnip over the years for a range of talent from the late Jack Shepherd and Derek Newark at the National to Joe Mantegna, Liev Schreiber and Alan Alda, among many others, at varying times on Broadway; the movie version, with Al Pacino, added a character played by Alec Baldwin. Marber's actresses are terrific – each and every one – and you feel their commitment to a performative endeavour that asks a lot when it comes to accents and physical posture before individual character investigation can even begin.
But time and again, I was pulled up short by the distance between the extremes of the male desperation on view and the reality of these women, many of them with tears in their eyes amidst a landscape where visible emotion is secondary to the linguistic (or sometimes physical) sucker punch: "I'm sorry because I don't like you," office manager Williamson (Dorothea Myer-Bennett) tells a cash-strapped Shelly "The Machine" Levene (Indira Varma, an Old Vic quasi-regular who must surely be the most innately elegant person ever to inhabit this of all roles).
Rosa Salazar, fresh from High Noon on the West End, gives off an eerie Goth vibe as a black-clad Richard Roma, the play's resident smoothie, and I was very taken by Mercedes Bahleda (pictured above) as the hapless Lingk, who walks headlong into a post-burglary milieu of deception and malfeasance and attempts to apply logic to a larcenous world that doesn't know the word.
The in-the-round staging forsakes the claustrophobia that drives the first-act encounters: the absence of banquettes doesn't allow Roma, for instance, to go so formidably in for the kill at its close. I liked the shower of papers that floods the stage at that point where the interval would be, and it was fascinating to note the period-perfect accuracy of the few documents I was able to grab a glance at while exiting the auditorium.
But was I exhilarated anew by the steel-trap precision of Mamet's playwriting? Yes and no: the evening is admirable in its reach if sometimes confounding in its result, but the abilility of Glengarry to sear the soul here proves as elusive as this play's most-wanted leads.
- Glengarry Glen Ross at the Old Vic to July 18
- More theatre reviews on theartsdesk
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