Glengarry Glen Ross

David Mamet leaves me rather cold as a dramatist, though I admire his skill with dialogue.  This production at the Apollo theatre has some exceptional acting from Jonathan Pryce as the ageing salesman Shelley Levene and Aidan Gillen as his young rival Richard Roma.  There are excellent performances too from Peter McDonald, Matthew Marsh and Paul Freeman, a terrific 1980s office set with grey metal filing cabinets (remember them?) and wonky chairs.  What Mamet does best, like Coward and Pinter, is listen to the way people really talk, which sounds simple but isn't too easy in practice.  It's a short play, only 80 minutes, and the characters, unlike Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, don't have the rounded quality or depth that leads us to care about them.  No doubt that wasn't Mamet's intention.  I haven't seen the play on stage before, and I thought there was one key turning point that didn't quite have the impact that it should.  Near the end we discover that the man who has staged a mock burglary of the office isn't Aaronow, who's been put up to it in Act One, but Levene.  Somehow this moment of discovery seemed to fall rather flat, but that may be the fault of the writing, not the actors.  As a person who has always completely lacked the salesmanship gene, I found all the characters quite alien and unpleasant.  Mamet's view of the American dream may be more subtle than I'm giving him credit for, but perhaps I'm looking for a level of ambiguity that he isn't trying to create.  Great acting, anyway, and a chance to see Pryce in the West End for the first time since his performance in Albee's The Goat a couple of years ago. The director is James Macdonald, who was responsible for an excellent revival of Joyce's Exiles in the Cottesloe and for the Royal Court's Drunk Enough To Say I Love You last year.