Speed the Plow

David Mamet, the Hollywood writer, has written a play about Hollywood and Matthew Warchus' production is populated by two Hollywood stars, Kevin Spacey and Jeff Goldblum. This is high octane stuff. The writing is brilliant and the performances are electric. Jeff Goldblum plays a newly promoted head of production in a studio and the opening of the play finds him installed in his brand new office still littered with step ladders and paint pots. Into the office bounces - and I mean bounces - Kevin Spacey as Charley Fox. Charley is an old time buddy of Goldblum's characetr, Gould, and doesn't really resent the fact that he has been promoted over Charley's head. His resentment is tempered because Charley has a fantastic package, a prison movie, a script that can't fail because it has worked so many times before in other movies and a star in full ascendancy as part of the package. The exchanges between Goldblum and Spacey are delivered at such speed and clarity. The two actors obviously had a ball in rehearsal and in this performance we were invited to the ball as well. At one stage Spacey is doing physical exercise with fag in mouth and still keeping the dialogue going at breakneck speed. Not once was clarity lost and it is the audience who almost end up breathless not the actors. There are touches of the Marx brothers in the glibness and comedy of the dialogue.

The final conclusion to the deal has to be delayed to the following morning but eh, it's a done deal, ain't it? Enter the third character, Laura Michelle Kelly's Karen. She plays Goldblum's temporary secretary. Charley Fox, so high on the adrenalin of the big deal he is going to be part of in the morning, makes the mistake of betting Gould he can't lay his temporary secretary this very evening.

The second act takes place at Gould's apartment and is virtually a monologue by Karen, with sparse interposes by the Goldblum character. It centres on her trying to sell him the idea of making a film out of a worthy but very abstract book. Her main premise is that making the film of the book would be so much more than a moneyspinner. It would make him a film maker rather than a studio hack. Laura Michelle Kelly is believable even though Mamet's dialogue sounded much more clonking than it had in the first act. I couldn't believe in the book, which was something to do with radiation death of the planet, and struck me as pretentious gooblydook. I am not sure still whether this was Mamet's intention or not.

It was with relish that the third act returned to the office the next morning and we awaited the reaction of Charley Fox. If the energy levels of the first act had been breakneck, they went up several more notches in the third. The arguments battered backwards and forwards, with nary a stop for breath. We had violence, male insecurity at its worst, male jostling for position and power, resentment, anger and desperation. This is acting at its finest. Language is used not as a tool of communication but as a weapon to batter and beat others into submission.

Hollywood is the dream factory but inhabited by these denizens it sounds like a nightmare place to be. The Laura Michelle Kelly character is much more subtle than that of the Spacey and Goldblum ones. Is this because Mamet is more at ease with the male characters than the female one? I was interested in my own reaction as part of the audience though. I was rooting for Charley throughout and grudgingly grew to like Gould but wasn't interested in the saving of mankind as proposed in the book supported by Karen. Why is that? Am I sold on the glamour of Hollywood? I was certainly seduced, excited and intrigued by this play and these performances; a wonderful production by Marcus Warchus.