Review of the Week: Glengarry Glen Ross at the Old Vic

The Old Vic, London SE1, until 18 July

With 1983’s Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet produced the greatest play ever written about men and their bullshit. The characters sell junky Florida real estate by fair means or (mostly) foul, but they’re also selling themselves in a zero-sum environment where the best salesman gets a Cadillac and the worst one gets canned. So they talk and they talk and they talk. Talking is their business and, ultimately, their downfall. And what they are saying is not always what they mean. When one character dances around the possibility of burgling the office and stealing the precious leads (the contacts that lead to sales) another asks, befuddled: “Are you actually talking about this or just talking?” No wonder directors can’t stay away from this one.

Patrick Marber’s production offers something new: an all-female cast. Even though the idea came from Mamet himself, it’s a boldly dissonant proposition for a play so emphatically interested in masculinity (“a man’s his job”, “a man acquires a reputation”, “I swear, it’s not a world of men”), not to mention pronoun chaos for reviewers. As with Marianne Elliott’s all-black reimagining of the distinctly Jewish Death of a Salesman in 2019, I’m sure not everybody will buy it, but I did.

Marber says in the programme that the switch liberated the cast from the shadow of the superb 1992 movie version and gave them somewhere new to go. The actors are playing male characters but they’re not playing at being men. Dorothea Myer-Bennett, as the prim and petty office manager John Williamson, and Niky Wardley’s brassy Dave Moss, wielding his/her handbag and lipstick like firearms, scramble gender signifiers in interesting ways. Ultimately, the play’s concerns with dog-eat-dog capitalism and the weaponisation of words are universalised rather than feminised. You can remove the musk of testosterone from Glengarry Glen Ross but it still reeks of cigarettes and flop-sweat.

Despite the difficulty level of Mamet’s triple-espresso rhythms, there are no weak performances here. If there’s a catch, then it’s Indira Varma as Shelly “The Machine” Levene – not because she doesn’t do a great job but because she’s fundamentally miscast. Perfected by Jack Lemmon in the movie, Levene should be so crumpled and washed-out that his insistence that he can turn things around is clearly delusional. He’s a 1980s Willy Loman, albeit more obnoxious, running out of patter. But even a greying wig and horrendous make-up can’t erase Varma’s natural glamour and strength and render Levene’s defeat inevitable. That said, she nails his frantic oscillations between wheedling desperation and a crowing bravado, completely unjustified by his circumstances, that reminded me somewhat of Donald Trump. He, too, is a creature of 1980s real estate, so it’s no wonder he believes that just saying something will make it so. Is he actually talking about a great deal with Iran or just talking?

I have no qualms about Rosa Salazar as Ricky Roma, the star salesman who’s a magician with words. Turning to the stage after 15 years in comedy and sci-fi, the American actress was easily the best thing in Eric Roth’s misbegotten adaptation of High Noon and she’s a volcanic event here. Glittering and vampiric in her black leather coat and slicked-back hair, she has the kind of voracious charisma that could eat the world alive. Watching her stalk her prey, spin a single word into an unexpected laugh-line, flick out her tongue like a whip, or even just eat a banana, is exhilarating. She queers the role, turning Roma’s machismo into mischief.

Marber stages the play in the round, like a boxing ring for verbal combat. Rob Howell’s cunning, minimalist stage design, which transforms a Chinese restaurant into a ransacked office with little more than a snowfall of paper, eliminates the need for an interval and therefore any release of pressure. It’s rat-a-tat all the way. Even as somebody who thinks directors should relax and treat the knockout “Always be closing” monologue that Mamet wrote for Alec Baldwin in the movie as canonical, I swear I didn’t miss it this time.

Two of the best scenes are essentially theatrical performances to an audience of one: Roma’s profane carpe diem speech to a shellshocked James Lingk (Mercedes Bahleda), which Salazar plays like a seduction, and Levene’s proud reenactment of the big sale he believes will save him. These are men who relish performance and worship a great story. They live for the tales they can tell. But in both cases their rhetorical wizardry is not enough to bend the world to their will. The suckers turn out to be them.

Dorian Lynskey is the Nerve’s theatre critic. He co-hosts the politics podcast Origin Story. His 2019 book The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s 1984 was longlisted for both the Baillie Gifford and Orwell Prize.