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 The End Of Loving

The End Of Longing

By Matthew Perry

That's What Friends Are For

http://endoflonging.co.uk/

Long before the sitcom Friends hit our screens in our homes, the place of friendship and love in modern life provided the script of many a Hollywood movie and also proved an ironic backdrop in at least one darkly humorous song sung by two celebrities in a hidden real-life illicit relationship   

Now Matthew Perry - of Friends' fame  - who tells us he contributed to the sitcom'sscripts  has put together his first play, also with dark undertones, The End of Longing. The story of four 40-something singletons drawn together in the bar and the bedroom. 

Smoothly directed by Lindsey Posner with slick design by Anna Fleischle, Perry takes the lead role as heavy drinking photographer Jack downing enough vodka "to finance Russia".

TLT and her four wheeled conveyance did wonder exactly what the title meant and if it were a quote from a poem or similar. A quick Google turned up a political science paper "The End of Longing ? Notes towards a history of post war German Longing" - surely not? - and the equally unlikely source of a historical novel by Australian writer Ian Reid.

Well, maybe we are given notes ... The quickly passing staccato scenes are like the pages of a notebook quickly turning and have the feel of a a sitcom or soap, even to the point of one character joking whether they have half an hour's worth of material. 

The over size  angular scenery sliding in and out could be in a studio lot and, after tragedy looms in the second act, the power of positive thinking and a happy ending wins out.

  

The types are familiar TV characters: A high-class $2,500 an hour hooker Stephanie (statuesque Jennifer Mudge). An female pharma executive desperate to have a baby Stevie (Christina Cole a bundle of nervous energy). The two women bonded reaching for the same latte in some coffee shop or other ;). And, the most intriguing character,  the seemingly dim but good natured Joseph (a finely judged performance from Lloyd Owen) who met Jtack on the sports' field.  

Maybe behind this brittle play, there's a  real story which the production reflects. Certainly Perry's battle with drink and drugs hit the headlines. But is it too fanciful to think that the genuine nature of  friendship after fame strikes must also be a obsession?

There are hints of a self reflexive play here reflecting on the skewing of life by TV tropes with its references to the TV process with its switching of old wine in new bottles, to pitch, sell, stay in the limelight and update to today's broadcasting currency.

We're in a bar, we're in a bedroom, we're in a late night pharmacy, we're in a hospital, in a church asking for a miracle and maybe finally on the cusp of a script pitch and commission. Then there are the off stage plots - pretending to be a couple to meet the parents, the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and so on.  

In the end, it's Matthew Perry who is the draw and Friends' fans may well be satisfied. It's an odd fish of a play but we prefer to believe it's a more sophisticated vehicle than a  shuffling of pre-programmed plot cards and characters, leaving us to discern what is actually happening and what is TV fantasy.  An amber light for an uneven play given a polished production.

Speed-The-Plow Review

Speed-The-Plow

by David Mamet

http://www.atgtickets.com/shows/speed-the-plow/playhouse-theatre/

Speed-The-Lo

With the press feeding frenzy on the first ever stage appearance of LiLo (yes, TLT and her coupé are down there with the yoofspeak!), it sometimes felt like life imitating art, or maybe commerce, at the Playhouse Theatre. 

Yet scaffolding outside turned out to be real,  not perches for the papps. And as hard-hatted builders did not leap to attention when TLT drove up in her limousine, they were probably not undercover reporters. Even so, advance publicity for David Mamet’s 1988 play “Speed-The-Plow” indicates  the baying hacks have never studied  Hillel the Elder’s monoped precept of brotherly love. Or maybe they view LiLo as some parole-breaking ho rather than a brother ... 

So ...

”Will LiLo overcome the Mean Critics, learn some life lessons - surely every feelgood Hollywood film has a pseudo morality? -  and emerge triumphant ...?” 

Well ... 

Firstly, all three actors in this preview performance had acting chops but – TLT is undecided whether it is the play or the direction by Lindsay Posner which make this an uneven theatrical experience. 

Bobby Gould (Richard Schiff of "West Wing" fame) is a newly-promoted or appointed (TLT and sidekick didn't know the play before seeing this) Hollywood executive with the power to “green light” new studio productions. (How thrilling ... has David Mamet read TLT’s blogs ;)?!. 

Erstwhile colleague Charlie Fox (an exuberant Nigel Lindsay) sees his seemingly more cerebral former colleague, suddenly lifted on the shoulders of a corporation, as the gateway to riches with his own populist hack work – a predictable prison violence-fest. 

Add to this testosterone mix a shapely tomato  - yes, TLT  is also down there with the male chauvinist slang! - Karen the temp secretary (Lindsay Lohan) who becomes a tool in Charlie’s blinkered aggression to promote his private interests but turns out to have her own unhealthy (for Charlie) interest in radiation ...

Nigel Lindsay is the most consistent of the performers in this office (and bedroom) satire with an ebullient Charlie invading the stage as he intends to make a cinematic killing, let loose to become a Hollywood made man. Richard Schiff looks and moves the part as Bobby but until the second act his faltering diction upsets the play's balance.

OK, OK, I’m coming to her – in the first act Lindsay Lohan, while slightly constrained, projects her lines clearly, naturally, bringing a poise and dignity to the role of Karen. But oh, and oh, did someone threaten her in the interval? Or did the boys not let her in to the secrets of the rest of the plot? 

Although still clear, she seemed nobbled, delivering her second act lines as a perfunctory duty. She appeared relieved to be viewed a part of the team when taking her bow (ok, from the lofty heights of The Gods, TLT has given in to the common mob, making up her own plot and indulging in a bit of unwarranted amateur psychology like everyone else) !!!  

While  Lohan goes down like a bear market automated trade, Schiff grabs his opportunity and somewhat frenetically but authentically comes into his own. The problem is all three actors throughout feel as if they are acting in different plays, leaving the rhythm of the plot in tatters, not helped by a prolonged gap for a scene change in the second act. Maybe by press night, it’ll be pulled together. In the meantime, TLT and her roadster cannot bring themselves to present their coveted green light but are happy to shove it on the amber light “maybe”  pile.