Speed-the-Plow review: Power trips without the intoxicating authority

Speed-the-Plow

Civic Theatre, Tallaght

★★☆☆☆

Inside an office somewhere in Hollywood, a studio executive has news to share. “This morning a man came to me,” Charlie says, grinning on the verge of a big break.

Such is the coup of Verdant’s new production of Speed-the-Plow, David Mamet’s breakneck play from 1988, that Charlie is no longer a red-blooded man but a woman formidable in a power blazer, delivering the line almost with a jazz step. She could be describing a conquest.

By flipping its characters’ genders, this restaging of Mamet’s satirical comedy poses intriguing new possibilities. Charlie and their friend Bobby, the influential head of production at a studio, were written as two gatekeeping men, rallying around a superficially commercial film project while making a wager on seducing a woman assistant. It sounds like the version of Hollywood that society has recently been trying to address.

Now we seem to be in an alternative version of the 1980s where, in Louise Dunne’s costuming, women dressed in shoulder pads and wide lapels are calling the shots as they ogle a new male assistant. The grubby glamour of show business is still present.

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This production’s greatest subversion is the way it replaces Mamet’s misogynistic men. “We’ll talk about boys and clothes,” Bobby says, making lunch plans with a line that could originally be read as a self-mocking joke but now sounds more like a reference to a perk.

[ Madonna played this preyed-on assistant on Broadway. Now a man is stepping into her shoes ]

Less successful are the attempts of Andy Crook, who took over as director when Janet Moran had to step down for health reasons, to map the play’s power trips. After Charlie – highly charged in Jolly Abraham’s whip-smart performance – brings Bobby the promise of a famous movie star from a rival studio, they take turns applauding each other: Bobby is commended for her long-standing loyalty; Charlie is offered a co-producer credit. If superiority is fuelled by respect and even worship, these prosaic compliments lack the wow factor.

There is a sense that authority isn’t especially intoxicating. “Yes. Wealth,” Bobby says at one point, agreeing with what’s important – but Tara Egan-Langley delivers the line softly and privately to herself, as if it were a quiet ambition.

As the play moves into the intimacy of Bobby’s apartment, where stripes of sunset shine through window blinds in Eoin Winning’s lighting design, her pitfalls have, surprisingly, left her unbruised. She doesn’t seem hesitant after Charlie suggests she isn’t attractive, or motivated to win the wager by seducing the assistant played by Macleod Stephen. There are no signs of insecurity from her, while he gives a long-winded summary of an alternative film project and pitches an idea under the guise of seducing her.

That may suggest male manipulation to be insidious, even in alternative versions of reality. Yet Mamet’s story is also that of a downfall; without emphasis on the missteps, it can lack a sense of plummeting down. It is a work of velocity: even the trademark mouthy dialogue seems designed for a delivery so fast as to nearly derail its own speakers. Without that hurtle, Speed-the-Plow is more of a stroll.

Speed-the-Plow is at the Civic Theatre, Tallaght, Dublin 24, until Saturday, April 8th; the Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire, from Thursday, April 13th, until Saturday, April 15th; the Ramor Theatre, Virginia, Co Cavan, on Wednesday, April 26th; and Droichead Arts Centre, Drogheda, on Thursday, April 27th