Imagine a rugby prop-forward pitching a movie idea to a Conservative rabbi. That’s how it looks, for a minute or two at least, but Lindsay Posner’s revival of David Mamet’s scabrous Hollywood satire sounds right from the get-go. Nigel Lindsay gets mileage out of the contrast between his burly build and the brown-nosing that his wannabe producer Charlie Fox has to do; Richard Schiff, as studio exec Bobby Gould, speaks in a much more unbuttoned way than he wears his three-piece suit.
         
Speed-The-Plow has two strikes against it, both in terms of casting. The first is specific to London, and is the memory of the incandescent 2008 pairing of Kevin Spacey and Jeff Goldblum as Charlie and Bobby respectively. Lindsay and Schiff try not to worry about that shadow, and concentrate on being the best they can be, which is pretty good. They don’t quite get up to Mach 1 on those… What? Those... yes… fragmented Mametese exchanges, but Schiff in particular is strong in the other major key, the excessively articulated Mametsplanations when a character sets out How Things Are.
         
The other drawback is the air of “star vehicle” that has surrounded the third role, that of Gould’s ambitious, manipulative temp secretary Karen, ever since Madonna created the role on Broadway in 1988. This time, neither Posner nor Nigel is the Lindsay whose work most of the audience will come to see, but rather Lindsay Lohan, the screen star of whom the euphemism of choice has in recent years been “troubled”. Well, the vultures will be disappointed: Lindsay Lohan in non-train-wreck shock. Yes, on press night she took one audible prompt, but she didn’t otherwise put a foot wrong (on legs that, in L.A.-speak, stretch all the way up to Pacoima), although slightly at a loss what to do with her hands. Nor is she prey to the overacting so often indulged in by screen actors making the transition to stage; she plays the emotions straightforwardly, and they carry across the theatre.
         
She does all that is required of her in personifying one of the horns of the dilemma facing Bobby: whether to opt for Charlie’s bankable but hollow action movie or Karen’s novel adaptation which is profound but box-office and career death. Mamet doesn’t often write credible parts for women or subtly managed plot reverses, and this is no exception. But you get a lot of bang for your buck.
     
Written for the Financial Times.