GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS
Apollo
Theatre, London W1
Opened 12 October, 2007
****
Glengarry Glen Ross (1984) is
not among David Mamet's deepest or most impassioned plays. But it is
surely the finest distillation of the style of speech that has become
identified with him, which is a matt— No. Wait a second. This is it. This is it. Which is a matter of
ellipsis, incompleteness, hesitation, repetition and probably deviation
too; Mamet characters would make terrible Just A Minute panellists. It takes
Pinteresque banality and gives it a contemporary American tang, and
like Pinter's dialogue it sounds at once entirely natural and quite
abstract. Mamet takes speech beyond poetry into a kind of aural ballet:
you can hear words leaping from spot to spot, pirouetting on a comma,
going en pointe without
actually moving towards a target.
At least, this is true when it is delivered properly. It amazes me how
many performers fail to hear the natural rhythms in Mamet's lines and
seek to impose their own. Even the all-star movie version of Glengarry is not immune. Nor is
James Macdonald's West End revival, but it's damn close. Paul Freeman
as George Aaronow, the most lacklustre of a quartet of fraudulent
Chicagoan real-estate salesmen, occasionally misjudges a rhythm; Aidan
Gillen as hot-shot Richard Roma foolishly tries to impose his own pace
on to his first-act monologue, but locks in perfectly in the second act
(although the occasional native Dublin vowel escapes, surprisingly from
an actor who has spent much of the past couple of years playing
Italian-American city councilman Tommy Carcetti in HBO TV series The Wire). You begin to luxuriate
in superficially content-free exchanges such as: "Are you actually
talking about this, or are we just..." – "No, we're just..." – "We're
just 'talking' about it." – "We're just speaking about it."
I say "superficially", because everyone here has ulterior motives.
Mamet shows us the unscrupulousness of these hucksters by concentrating
not on the sharp end of the sale (we see only one actual customer, an
ineffectual specimen to whom Roma delivers his big first-act spiel),
but on what they do to each other: they conspire, cross,
double-cross... Even if we had not heard it proposed in the first act,
it would come as no surprise that during the interval, as it were, the
outfit's office has been broken into and the precious list of sales
leads stolen, most certainly by one of the salesmen.
The moviemakers adulterated Mamet when they gave Jack Lemmon a human
motive to render his character more sympathetic. Jonathan Pryce here
has no truck with that as the same character, Shelly Levene, now on the
skids as a salesman and sweating desperation but still pumping out the
shtick to no-hope clients and to office manager Williamson alike. Peter
McDonald is point-perfect as the latter, giving no inkling that he is a
last-minute replacement in the role. As all around him get het up first
about the monthly sales competition (the winner gets a Cadillac, the
loser gets the sack) and then the break-in, McDonald remains impassive,
letting the lines and his fellows do the donkey-work just as Williamson
would. The sharpest performance of the lot, though, is Matthew Marsh as
the misanthropic Moss, the one who "just speaks" about a break-in
during Act One and spews some magnificent bile in Act Two. Moss has
fangs, and Marsh shows them clearly.
I have often seen a set design elicit a round of applause, but never
one like Anthony Ward's office set, a place obviously squalid to begin
with and now further trashed by the burglar. Yet trash can yield
treasure, and does so here, even in barely 80 minutes of playing time.
Written for the Financial
Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
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