Review Glengarry Glen Ross

Francis Beckett is sold a gem of a production as a searing 1980s' David Mamet play shows its true value

 Glengarry Glen Ross 
by David Mamet 

The Real Estate Of The Nation
http://www.atgtickets.com/venues/playhouse-theatre/

Just over 30 years separate David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross and Arthur Miller’s masterpiece Death of a Salesman but they are special for the same reason.

Their sad, broken-down salesmen – Miller’s Willy Loman from 1949, Mamet’s Shelly Levene from 1983 – may be pretty worthless people, plying a parasitic trade, but Miller and Mamet care about them, and they make us care about them too.

The genius of Miller and Mamet is that they put on stage people from whom, in real life, one would recoil – and yet, when those characters get their well-deserved comeuppance, it moves us almost to tears.

Loman and Levene may be symbols of everything that is worst about capitalism. But they are its victims, just as much as the people they gull are victims.

Glengarry Glen Ross is as near a perfect piece of dramatic writing as you’ll find. We get to spend an evening and the following morning with an American real estate company.

We spend the time in the company of four men who earn their commission by gulling people into buying  property they neither want nor need, two men who run the office and batten on their salesmens’ skill, and one man who falls for the salesmens’ wiles. And we are on the edge of our seat all the time.

The salesmen see themselves as the American dream personified: pioneers out on a dusty trail, with only their wits and their courage between them and oblivion.

When Americans talk about rugged individualism, they really mean poor saps like Loman and Levene.

They dress in their habitual uniforms, shabby grey suits, sell grey products designed by someone else, see themselves as cowboys, even as they do the bidding of even greyer men than themselves.

These salesmen also think of themselves as Men, with an upper case M. They dismiss wives and women, their own, if they have them, and those of their customers.

“A man’s his job” growls Shelley, and, when he finally makes a sale: “I’ve got my balls back.”  He tells what he calls his war stories, how cleverly he cajoled the customer, how he held the pen just so.

He thinks his skills, his charm, his beautiful voice, are all you need to succeed in the world. He is wrong.

Miller and Mamet understand that the skill these men have is a wonderful one; and that the exercise of the skill is what gives them self-worth. They think they do it to enrich themselves, but they could get richer sitting behind desks.

What drives them is the adrenaline rush of selling.  They are salesmen. They must sell, just as some people have to write.

I knew a man like that. He sold advertising space, and he was very good at it.  Yet the magazines for which he sold the space despaired of him. He had no interest at all in making sure bills were sent out, or even compiling the information that would enable someone else to send them out.

And it didn’t matter how often he was told to sell no more space to those companies that failed to pay up; he persisted in selling to them. Like Shelly Levene, he closed the deal.  That is what he did.

Levene is played in this production by Stanley Townsend – a startling, brilliant, mesmerising performance. He does not take the easy route of allowing Levene to sound as sad and pathetic as he is.

No, the bluff and bluster never lets up. It pours from his strong, fruity voice, telling the world he is in charge even as he is being pushed contemptuously off the edge.

Christian Slater and Kris Marshall are excellent as Ricky Roma, the younger salesman, and John Williamson, the deskbound agent of Levene's demise with Don Warrington giving solid support, but for me they were little more than foils for Townsend’s towering tour de force.

The night I saw it, Robert Glenister was ill – he had collapsed on stage on Friday and hopes to be back in a few days.  Understudy Mark Carlisle coped with the difficult part of salesman Dave Moss, but I felt for him: he had not had enough time to prepare, or to inhabit the part.

Chiara Stephenson gives us two magnificent and entirely convincing sets, a restaurant and an office, one for each act. Sam Yates directs with the proper respect for Mamet’s fully rounded characters and razor sharp dialogue.

A green light for this set of salesmen who deliver the goods at the Playhouse Theatre.

Review Dr Faustus

Dr Faustus
by Christopher Marlowe

Trading Futures
https://www.rsc.org.uk/

What kind of academic would Dr Faustus be in the modern age? OK, don't tell us, he's just a fictional character, a chap from a German sixteenth century chapbook who sold his soul. We know that!

But watching the RSC's version of Christopher Marlowe's Dr Faustus directed by Maria Aberg, we were put in mind of those academics, wittingly or unwittingly, on the side of the bad angels when they promoted their particular brand of financial models before credit came to the crunch in 2008.

The large black box stage is strewn with boxes of the sort Lehman Brothers' employees used to pack up their belongings when exiting the building and turning off the lights in that fateful year.

In slick black suits two men have a face off, mirror images of each other with burning matches held between two fingers of their hand. The one who has the chance, which some might construe as skill, to hold the match which extinguishes first is Dr Faustus, the other taking on the role of the Lucifer's emissary Mephistophilis.

On Barbican press night, Sandy Grierson drew the short flame as Dr Faustus, Oliver Ryan as white suited, bare-chested footpad Mephistophilis and the road to soul crunch began.  As if in some kind of unemployed post Lehman's limbo, Faustus sat in his study cum studio attended by gray bearded donnish Wagner (Nicholas Lumley), of a previoius generation, less slick in his knitted tank top.

Meanwhile magician mates Valdes ( Will Bliss) and Corneilus (John Cummins) egg on their friend to achieve the heights. The "bills"of Faustus, TLT and her automotive non-algorithmic engine ruminated, took on the guise of future trades. And the means of reaching his aspirations became more and more outlandish, fuelled by swigs of Vodka and who knows what other substances.

He strips off his city slicker accoutrements down to vest and pants, becoming part bovver boy skinhead, part punk. When he uses his shirt to dip in white paint and in a frenzy of creation draws a mystic pentangle in a circle, spattered with paint, he's almost like some Faustian Jackson Pollock on the road to creation and damnation.

It's certainly a stripped down one-act Faustus, the comic subplots discarded. So it may be 24 years of magical excess, absolute power, sating the thirst for knowledge, a contract signed with his blood. Or it could be a self-harming down-and-out hallucinating during one violent, abusive night.

Huge projections emerge on the backcloth, vertical neon lights hang down like stalactities  and discordant chords of a band like some tune of the spheres gone wrong make this an decidedly untraditional Faustus designed by Naomie Dawson with Orlando Gough composing the music.

Lucifer (Eleanor Wyld)  is a blonde nightclub host in a white trouser suit and heels with her parade of freaks, the seven deadly sins: High-kicking cat-suited Pride (Theo Fraser-Steele), a Tim Burton-type Covetousness (Rosa Robson) on stilts and outsize tree branch crutches; Black and white middle-aged girl Wrath (Ruth Everett) wields rapiers like Edward Scissorhands; Envy (Bathsheba Piepe) has a black executioner's hood and sexy body corset and swirling skirt ; Gluttony (Gabriel Fleary) has an obscene body with huge overhanging stomach and a hog's head while Sloth (Richard Leeming) slithers on the ground and Lechery (Natey Jones) is a bearded ladyman in white sparkly drag.

Black coated and homburg suited faceless demons and students rise up and surround Faust likr shades of Michael Jackson zombies. Meanwhile, friars seem to come out of a Star Wars film set. Drum beats ratchet up the tension. It's a world skewed where everything is out of season like the disembodied grapes which drop from the ceiling as a gift for the lascivious Duchess of Vanhott (Amy Rockson). But it's strangely resonant in our out-of-season supermarket age.

This is certainly a Faustus to conjure with, imprinting numerous outlandish, weird images on the audience's mind, a Faustus that loses the plot.

There's a Trainspotting kind of energy and a doubleness, as we've noted, that could be the conjurer and university doctor Faustus or equally a drug-den hallucination with real-life consequences when Helen of Troy (Jade Croot) is transformed into a vulnerable child.

It certainly made a visual impression on us, even if the tale of Faustus's understandable mission to gain knowledge, albeit at the expense of his soul, felt somewhat lost.  Your own devilish duo gives this secular Faust a neon amber light.