GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS
HHHH Playhouse Theatre, until February 3, 2018. Tickets: 0844 871 7631 DAVID Mamet’s coruscating play won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1984 and the subsequent award-winning film starred Jack Lemmon and Al Pacino. This scorching revival is a timely reminder of Mamet’s tightly-wound talent.
Like a street punk version of Arthur Miller’s Death Of A Salesman, it eviscerates the American dream with merciless skill.
The salesmen in a real estate company are under pressure to follow leads and make sales. Business is declining and the atmosphere thrums with testosterone and panic.
Every man from the slick super-salesman Ricky Roma (Christian Slater) to the ageing ex-top dog Shelley Levene (Stanley Townsend) are competing for leads to keep their names on the office sales board. Once you are off the board, you are out of work. This is a dog-eat-dog world where men in wrinkled suits lie, cajole, embroider facts and seduce potential suckers into buying dodgy property, operating on the fringes of legality.
Then one of them crosses a line into crime. The all-important leads are stolen and given to a rival firm in return for cash and a possible job.
Mamet’s language reeks of the locker room but the eloquence of his vividly drawn characters is breathtaking. They are sleight-of-mouth storytellers, masters of improvisation and Mamet’s attitude towards them is half contemptuous and half admiring. The tension between these extremes makes the play howl off the stage and the cast are terrific, particularly Kris Marshall as intractable office manager John, bitterly fractious
Dave (Robert Glenister) and downsliding George (Don Warrington). Director Sam Yates reins in the play’s paranoia which makes it even more effective, as if the characters are deluding themselves as much as their targets. A short, sharp, savagely entertaining night.