Theatre
Royal, Glasgow
Four
stars
Don’t
be fooled by the implied panoramas in the title of David Mamet’s 1983 play,
revived by director Sam Yates for this recast touring version following its
West End success. Like everything else in Mamet’s brutal dissection of everyday
capitalism at its most hysteria-driven, the wide-open idyll the phrase conjures
up is a con designed to lure in the gullible, for whom such aspirations are a
lifestyle choice.
By
rights, Mamet’s portrait of toxic masculinity among the property-selling
classes should be as old hat as the casual racism, big suits and even bigger
talk sported by Mark Benton’s over the hill Shelley Levene and Nigel Harman’s
relentless hustler Ricky Roma. Tethered to a fiercely competitive office
environment and without a woman in sight or even referred to, they are hyped-up,
testosterone-driven, status-chasing sharks who would trample each other into
the crumbling foundations of everything they stand for to get ahead.
Such
high-rolling posturing is but a symptom, alas, of a culture that brayed its way
towards where we are now. In this way, looking at the play today is like
jumping into a time capsule to revisit the ghosts of economic disasters past. With
the first act introducing us to the play’s six principal players through a
series of duologues exchanged like bullets on designer Chiara Stephenson’s
gaudy Chinese restaurant set, it’s not difficult to read the office break-in
that drives the second half as a metaphor for impending financial collapse.
Roma
is a pre-Trumpian shyster with a flint-eyed intelligence to go with the
slimeball theatrics, both played to the max by Harman. As Levene, rather than
playing him as a sad sack, Benton carries a bull in a china shop’s sense of
last-gasp desperation. There are points where his pugnaciousness can’t help but
resemble Tory terrier Mark Francois. This is a two-fisted portent of the shape
of things to come in a world where you can only hustle so much before you get
caught.
The Herald, April 9th 2019
Ends
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