Gate Theatre, Dublin
One of the more refreshing things about the salesmen in David Mamet’s seminal 1984 drama, a wicked dispatch from the piranha tank of Reagan’s America, is just how unashamedly corrupt they are.
Even from our financially battered vantage point, we expect hucksters to preserve a veneer of morality. But, peddling Florida swampland to guileless stooges, these men know there is nothing real about the real estate they sell; and that survival depends – in more ways than one – on their performance.
This is also what makes director Doug Hughes’s enjoyably terse and immensely detailed staging for the Gate such a pleasure. Mamet’s interpretation of the salesman, more profane and scuffed than Arthur Miller’s “smile and a shoeshine”, is also more timely: like the marketplace, the con artist, or, for that matter, the theatre, they manufacture and sell illusions. Hughes uses that dash of spice to make this well-cast production all the more piquant.
Owen Roe, for instance, a performer of great presence, is an intriguing choice for the once-legendary Shelley “The Machine” Levene, now a spluttering engine of spent machismo. “Streaks,” he tells John Cronin’s hollow-eyed office manager Williamson, who holds all the “leads”. “I pray it misses you.” But watch him draw up close or expand in cajoling gestures on Neil Patel’s shabby Chinese restaurant booth as he tries to fast-talk, then scam, his way out of terminal decline. It isn’t the blunt American idiom or heroic swearing that makes Mamet’s writing a challenge for an actor. It’s the hesitations, staccato exchanges and orphaned sentences that suggest a chaos of thought and quick recalculation. Roe sets the bar high for what follows.
Denis Conway’s inveterate swindler Moss, and Barry McGovern’s hapless Aaronow – an accessory to Moss’s plans, “because you listened” – neatly sketch a world where words conjure up reality, but its most hypnotic illustration is still Richard Roma’s first appearance. Al Pacino’s film performance has associated Roma, almost indelibly, with low-lidded charisma, which is why Reg Rogers’s performance is such a revelation. Legs tightly crossed, precariously balanced on the edge of the couch and reeling in Peter Hanly’s prospective client, Lingk, from two tables away, his Roma is disarmingly prissy but still seductive and Joan Bergin’s meticulous costuming makes him look the part: a wolf in chic clothing.
It’s the performance the occasion requires, you realise during Roma’s later browbeating tirades or a hastily improvised charade conducted with Roe’s newly puffed-up Levene (a true mark of their rapport). Hanly, largely silent but a consummate reactor, prefigures the struggle to come with one telling glance at his forgotten coat and the production is electric with such subtle moments. The devil is in the detail, Lingk discovers far too late, but it is a truth already known to these frantic men, to this thorough production and to our twice-bitten age.
The marvel of their performance, then, and its fabulous spell, is that we can still be so readily taken in by it.
Runs until July 14th
