Speed-The-Plow
by David Mamet
State Theatre Company
Space

David Mamet wrote his first plays when he was teaching acting. Tired of trying to find new exercises for students, he began making up his own. An essential part of building a character as Stanislavski will tell you, is ‘ determining what he or she wants from others in the play ‘ and David Mamet constructs intricate, subtle and disturbing theatre around these questions.

Mamet has written more than twenty plays as well as screenplays for The Verdict and The Untouchables. He also wrote and directed House of Games featuring Joe Mantegna and Lindsay Crouse. Like much of his work, House of Games is about deception and disclosure and the elaborate manoeuvre which invert and subvert the meanings of what is said. Speed-the-Plow is similarly an ethical thriller, a discomforting exemplum on human trust with games of show-and-tell and hearts worn on the sleeve and close to the chest.

Speed-the-Plow draws its name from a Puritan greeting meaning: may you prosper, more power to your arm, make hay while the stock exchanges. In the context of a play about two studio producers deciding to “greenlight” a movie certain to make a fortune, the title is a complex irony. For one thing, Mamet is half in love with easeful capitalism and fascinated particularly by traders, dealers and con artists, not to mention the baroque scatology of their transactions. Characters in his Pulitzer-winning play Glengarry Glen Ross (based in part on Mamet’s own experiences trying to hustle real estate) are like Willy Loman on benzedrine.

But, as in other work, in Speed-the-Plow Mamet understands the downside of all this samurai commerce – not least the fact that it is rapidly heading for global infarction. His is a world writ small though, large statements about doom and decay, as the play states with reflexive irony, are for Eastern cissies. For Fox and Gould, the movie moguls, life is about going to work to make money and going home to spend it. But when Karen, a temporary receptionist, comes to the office, new choices arise. Suddenly Gould is being persuaded that the sure-fire Dougie Brown prison blockbuster movie deal Fox has set-up should not get the greenlight but a Radiation film about the end of the world should instead. It won’t make money and, contrary to every rule in Hollywood, it will have something to say. Gould, as his name suggests, is offered a choice between good and gold.

With a strong cast Ian Watson has brought the ingredients of Mamet’s theatre together cogently and to powerful effect. Performed without an interval the production is splendidly paced and timed, with moments of comedy allowed to invigorate but never dissipate the tension.

Kathryn Sproul’s set tells all – doubling as office and apartment and painted in post-modernist greys and pale greens, it is an environment pretending to be functional because it is featureless and purposeful because it is without idiosyncrasy. John Comeadow’s unyieldingly bland lighting only heightens the super-realist, clinical effect. It is a room Harold Pinter would be proud of.

As Gould, George Whaley anchors the production and his understatement and detail proves what Mamet himself has discovered – that there is a whole gamut of emotions between A and B. Henri Szeps’s Fox is also true to name -vulpine, wheedling, anxious and ruthless. Deficient in power, he has a feral radar for locating his verbal and territorial opportunities. Briony Williams, in her first production for State, gives an astute and memorable performance as Karen. Like other women characters in Mamet’s work the part is ambivalently drawn and both Watson and Williams have made intelligent decisions. Speed-the-Plow is a rich work and this fine production demonstrates why David Mamet is a big deal.

“Fiscal Violence” The Adelaide Review, No.64, June, 1989, pp. 22-23.