Benedict Nightingale, in his review of
Speed-The-Plow, rightly questions
the plausibility of the second-act turnaround in which studio exec
Bobby Gould is talked around from being about to green-light a prison
movie with a bankable star into going with an adaptation of a turgid
“literary” novel. He is also right to say that this does little
to detract from the fireworks between Kevin Spacey and Jeff Goldblum in
the first and third acts; they are surely the most dynamic double-act
to hit the London stage in years. But I wonder whether that
second-act flaw is not indicative of a weakness in Mamet’s writing more
generally. I’m not thinking of the fact (though it is a fact)
that he writes far better male roles than female. Rather, it
seems to me that I can’t recall a Mamet play in which a plot twist was
plausibly achieved by sustained argument rather than sudden
revelation. Even the definitive work of Mamet-ese
Glengarry Glen Ross, which is all
about the use of words to change people’s opinions (in the form of
salesmanship), rests its crucial reversal on a single slip of the
tongue.
The speed of Spacey’s and Goldblum’s tongues in the first act was also
remarked upon by several reviewers, who were hard put even to pick up a
number of lines. I saw the show a few days after the first
reviews had come out; perhaps they were marshalling their resources in
a matinée performance, but I suspect that the matter had been
noted and worked on – at any rate, the dialogue was pacy and dynamic
rather than frantic and gabbled.
Chum
Tim Walker suggests in his review of
An
English Tragedy that “when it makes its inevitable West End
transfer I would recommend […] drafting in Rupert Everett to play John
Amery”, thus demonstrating his own priorities as regards various kinds
of authenticity. It seems that Everett’s being almost a
generation older than John Amery is not a problem; rather, Tim is being
an authentic friend to Everett, who has not only appeared in previous
pieces as a noted chum of the reviewer but on occasion even as Tim’s
theatregoing companion. Strangely, he didn’t mention that
connection this time.
Klan
The ultimate example of faithful adherence took place in Leeds. I
may not have seen
Hamlet at
Elsinore, but I have now seen Sarah Kane’s
Blasted in Room 807 of the Queen’s
Hotel in Leeds, which although unnamed in the script is generally
accepted to be the hotel she had in mind for the setting of the
play. The Nineteen: Twenty Nine company performed it to around a
dozen people at a time, instructing the audience to wear masks
à la Punchdrunk, and with I
suspect a similar unspoken ambivalence of effect. It was not
simply a matter of making us appear impersonal to each other – even, in
our Ku Klux Klan-style white hoods, sinister – as we watched the
progression of sexual and violent abuse in Kane’s dystopia.
Rather, up so close, I think it might also have been easier for the
performers not to have recognisable faces watching them… for it was we
who were in their faces more than they in ours. (In any case, I
apologise to the company for not being masked myself; there weren’t
enough hoods to go round, and the performance began just before I could
tear holes in one of the pillow-cases.)
I found it instructive to see that authenticity of location can
actually detract from the power of the viewing experience.
Obviously, we don’t truly believe in these events when we see them
onstage, but again the closeness served principally to emphasise their
unreality and the fact that the company were working gingerly around
numerous constraints. (They couldn’t even get an exemption from
the hotel’s smoking ban for the several cigarettes smoked in the
script; consequently, the character of Ian, supposedly unrepentant
about the disintegration of his one remaining lung, had on this
occasion to keep taking out his packet of cigs, preparing to light one
up and then either changing his mind or being distracted). All
told, it was a brave idea, but one whose drawbacks should perhaps have
led to its abandonment before it was fully executed (no pun
intended). Still, it took me a while to drop off to sleep in the
same hotel later that night… a problem I doubt was shared by the
company, who had scheduled three or four performances a day for
themselves at two-hourly intervals, leaving them only 10–15 minutes
between shows.
Written for Theatre
Record.