Revival doesn’t quite close the deal
Glengarry Glen Ross
Playhouse
By turns bitterly funny and acutely savage, Glengarry
Glen Ross (GGR), a portrait of Chicagoan real-estate salesmen vying for business – and survival – at all costs, premiered at the National in 1983. In so doing, it helped establish David Mamet as the most unsparing eviscerator of the American dream since Arthur Miller.
If anything, Mamet’s gaze was harsher. In the expletive-ridden patois of his all-male desperadoes could be heard the yapping of dogeat-dog capitalism at its feral worst. He dedicated the play (which won the Pulitzer Prize) to Harold Pinter.
Mamet may have owed a debt to British theatre but, in reviving GGR just over the water from the National at the Playhouse, rising director Sam Yates illustrates just how much we owe to Mamet. Although the piece is presented as being manifestly of its period – the décor situates the action in pre fax-technology days, and there are nostalgic allusions to the moneyrich Sixties, now a lost land to the over-the-hill types scrabbling for deals – the insecurity feels pertinently present-tense.
What’s missing, at least initially and a touch too glaringly, from Yates’s production is a palpable sense of the clock ticking – a stomach-churning countdown to personal catastrophe. Those who pull the strings, agency owners Mitch and Murray (never seen), have concocted a brutal incentive scheme: the salesman who closes the most deals and gets on top of “the board” (a blackboard tally of winners and losers) will win a Cadillac; the two at the bottom get kicked out. When we see Stanley Townsend’s old-timer Shelley Levene in the first of three establishing scenes in a Chinese restaurant begging and cajoling his young superior – the wintry Williamson – for the better “leads” that will improve his chances on the doorstep, we should feel that he is at last-chance saloon.
Though comparisons with the superlative 1992 film are on the whole best avoided (not least owing to its inclusion of Kevin Spacey, on lethal form, as Williamson), Jack Lemmon was unforgettable in that pivotal role of Levene, his plaintive, worn-out looks as eloquent as anything in the script. Here, Townsend gives you a man who once walked tall on easy charm, and thinks he can do so again, but the panic underheating his words is on too low a mark. If you don’t feel the terror propelling the staccato pacing, the chat can turn into speechy Mamet-y mannerism.
As with salesmen, then, so with shows – first impressions count for a lot. Once the production introduces us to Christian Slater as Roma, it moves up a gear in terms of crackling authenticity. Slater, never better, consistently uses his hands as if weaving ensnaring webs around people, wielding his eyes like pincers. The pressure of the job has, you feel, pushed the swaggering Roma into soulful bar-room philosophising, but even that shred of humanity is in turn commodified into a sly sales-pitch: his man-to-man confidences are designed to coax a diner into the trap of a prospective buy that it will be nigh on impossible to wriggle out from.
Once we’ve cleared the stop-start early scenes and the hurdle of a distracting interval, and we’re plunged into the ferrets-in-a-sack mayhem of the office itself (the burglary of the sought-after Glengarry “leads” raising the stakes), the evening comes into its own. Death in Paradise’s Kris Marshall as Williamson could be more viperish and less wall-flowery, but there’s terrific work from Robert Glenister as the perpetually pent-up Moss, with Don Warrington as his hangdog de facto sidekick Aaronow. And even Townsend earns his comic keep, playing ad-hoc stooge (and pretend client) to assist Roma in his scam, while all hell breaks loose. Close, but no cigar.
Until Feb 3. Tickets: 0844 871 7631; glengarrywestend.com