The Stage

Speed-the-Plow

Published Friday 15 February 2008 at 13:25 by Gerald Berkowitz

David Mamet’s 1988 satire of Hollywood covers some of the same ground as Swimming With Sharks, seen earlier this season, but far more efficiently and effectively, as he dissects the Hollywood insider’s conflicting impulses to get rich, screw others and make art.

Mamet’s interest here, as in many of his other plays, is in the mental games men play with themselves and others to justify what they do for a living - in this case, a studio executive who can be lured away from his primary purpose of making money by the illusion of being a serious thinker and artist, so that a buddy must fight to win him back to the true path.

Director Matthew Warchus gives the 90-minute play an unflagging intensity throughout by ramping up both the comedy and the sense of how high the stakes are for the characters. Jeff Goldblum plays the executive as a man of no evident talent or depth, who has gotten where he is just by being able to talk faster than anyone else, and who is therefore very easily seduced by the assurance that he does indeed have unappreciated sensitivity.

As the junior producer whose sure-fire hit is endangered by Goldblum’s apostasy, Kevin Spacey gives a chilling portrait of one of life’s born losers, unable to believe his own luck even when riding high, and fighting for his life when it is threatened. And Laura Michelle Kelly invests the secretary who almost convinces her boss to commit to an art film rather than a blockbuster with the eerie fervour of the born-again religious fanatic for whom a convert is more a notch on her gunbelt than a saved soul.

Needless to say, Mamet is frequently very funny, occasionally very intense, and particularly aware of the ways men use obscenity as communication, code and weapon.