David Mamet is routinely praised for a dramatic language which is both stylised and naturalistic in its repetitions and incompletenesses. However, he has grown increasingly imprisoned by these linguistic expectations. Boston Marriage, in 1999, was his last major play not to be set in a professionally or socially restrictive environment (and even the latter aspect is arguable). Race, his 2009 work (opening in London coincidentally the month after its Toronto première), is his second play this century located in the legal world (following his dire courtroom farce Romance), and I suspect this is taking an easy way out for the Mametian twists of argument: putting them in the context of attorneys formulating a case gives events a ready-made stake, rather than having to imbue them with a drama of their own.
    
Race is, I suppose, a play about truth, justice and the American way, except that the first two are consistently shown to be mutable at best if not wholly illusory, and that very wispiness is what constitutes the third. Two law partners, one black and the other white, discuss whether or not to accept a defence brief for a middle-aged, rich white man accused of raping a young black woman; the lawyers’ assistant is also a young black woman. In some ways it’s a legal rewrite of Mamet’s Speed-The-Plow, with the assistant turning out to be far more crucial than she at first appears… except, of course, that if we have seen the earlier play, we are already alert to that likelihood, so once again the drama is diminished.
    
What remains is argument. Argument about… well, that title isn’t in any way misleading. Mamet’s thesis, such as it is, is that race is not just an inevitably hot topic, but a prism through which it is impossible ever to see straight or clearly. To the extent that this is true, it is a truism. However, as with political correctness in the case of Romance, Britain’s experience of racial issues is not charged along the same lines as America’s; Mamet’s comments are neither as intellectually valid here nor as emotionally high-tension, unlike those of for instance Bruce Norris in Clybourne Park. Terry Johnson’s production is agile, with Clarke Peters and especially Jasper Britton on fine form as the counselors, but they remain arguments on legs rather than characters, and Mamet has little of interest or import to tell us.

Written for the Financial Times.