Glengarry Glen Ross

We'd watched Glengarry Glen Ross a few weeks back - well, August, and a rewatch on my part. It's got a cast to die for: Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Ed Harris, Alan Arkin, Kevin Spacey, plus Alec Baldwin in a cameo and, hey, Jonathan Pryce plays a role where he hardly gets to say a word. It's Death of a Salesman eighties styley - a group of salesmen trying to convert tired leads into confirmed sales, and only the successful can be given the decent leads. Lemmon's on a losing streak, hasn't closed for weeks, is desperate. Harris is fed up with all this bullshit - reckons someone should steal those leads, take them elsewhere, sell them. Especially after Baldwin gives them the motivational speech. ( Cut for Language )

After a certain amount of toing and froing (we'd seen it recently, plus I fancied Christian Slater in Swimming with Sharks or Mark Thomas on the last night of his stand up) I got tickets for this, and tried to pick them up the day before - apparently you have to queue on the night. This wasn't a problem - we wandered through Shaftesbury Avenue, and failed to find that pizza restaurant in Piccadilly, indeed actually found few restaurants (the only food-free block in the West End, as if it were owned by ex-Quakers who had turned to drink but frowned on eating), popped into a Soho bookshop to look at the remainders and got to the theatre to find we had been upgraded from balcony to rear dress circle. We'd been bumped.

The play is less frantic than the film - whereas there's a whole lot of the salesmen intercut on the screen, the first half here is a series of dialogues between paired characters, such that you wonder if, say, Jonathan Pryce is just in the one scene. There are long pauses as the set changes - a slightly different diner. I think I'd stage it a bit less we're-in-a-different-place, or at least tie it up with music. (I remember the scene changes in Sexual Perversity in Chicago when I ASMed it - and I remember being caught on stage when the sound man triggered the lights.)

But it's a masterpiece of dialogue - not quite ever overlapping but as tight as can be short of that. There's no space for blowing a line, or stumbling. It must take forever to learn it. I don't think Pryce was quite as strong as Lemmon, but he does do the saggy, tired, burnt-out case very well. Aiden Gillen managed to perform without too much of the ghost of Al Pacino behind him - and since he is a graduate of Queer as Folk, there was a frisson of amusement with his use of the word "queer".

In the second half we get to the office of the salesmen, after a break-in in which the good leads have been stolen. Everyone is under suspicion, and Pryce is ecstatic because he has made a sale. It shifts from dialogues to ensemble and back again, as Mamet seems more comfortable with the head to head. As in the film, there's a sense of hopelessness to it all, as nbo one can come out of it very well. And then there's the shiver running through the audience as characters light up cigarettes.

There is, alas, no motivational speech - that was one of the ways that the play was opened out - and in fact the whole thing is not much more than a hour in length. Of course, if this were Pinter, it would be two hours, and perhaps the amount of dialogue means that you wouldn't want much more.

I fell out of love with theatre some years ago, but this was a very enjoyable experience. Maybe I should try and see more of it.