The American invasion of London's prime theatres continues unabated. But who is going to complain when it is the Atlantic Theater Company doing Mamet's 70s junkshop classic with just the right degree of authenticity? Clearly not the public since the run is already sold out.
The intriguing question is why Mamet's play survives so well. I suspect it is because the action effortlessly implies something far larger than itself. All that really happens is that Donny, the junkshop owner, enlists his young gofer, Bobby, in a coin- collection robbery: one that starts to go disastrously awry the moment Donny's hustling friend, Teach, ousts the boy and muscles in on the action. You might say, like the man in O'Casey, I see no magnificent meaning jumpin' out of that.
But Mamet's skill lies precisely in the way the story acquires metaphorical resonance. Donny tells his young pupil early on that "there's business and there's friendship": a fatal schism that not only rebounds on Donny himself but pinpoints America's divorce of the capitalist ethic from social life. Even more tellingly, these petty hoods persuade themselves that they have some moral right to their victim's coin collection.
Alongside this, Mamet hilariously harpoons the bull swagger and sexual fear of the American male. These guys talk big in order to disguise their panic, and no one more so than the interloping Teach. He starts off with a furious paranoid rant against two women in a coffee-shop that to me implies impotence. And, as the robbery gets closer, he comes out with phrases like "You want depth on the team", as if they were planning a raid on Fort Knox. The play goes wrong only when Teach is turned into a virtuosic star-turn: a trap that Neil Pepe's production and William H Macy's performance intelligently avoid. With his straight swept-back hair and thin moustache, Macy brilliantly shows Teach to be a nervy outsider who desperately wants to be part of the game. But he also brings out Teach's bullying vanity: almost his first action is to stare at himself in a compact and virtually his last is to shelter behind Donny when he interrogates the injured Bobby.
Philip Baker Hall's grizzled Donny is good without quite conveying his final moral awakening but Mark Webber's Bobby has the right tremulous desire to please and Kevin Rigdon's set is an amazing collection of American bric-a-brac including, significantly, portraits of Lincoln and JFK. It even contains a green Buddha, which at one point Teach demolishes: a nice nod towards Pinter's The Caretaker, which Mamet's play echoes in its ability to discover infinite riches in a cluttered room.
