Glengarry Glen Ross – Melbourne Theatre Company

Overview

Where some of director Alkinos Tsilimidos’s previous works for the Melbourne Theatre Company have been highlights of the company’s seasons — shows like Red and The Mountaintop — Glengarry Glen Ross is flat and unaffecting. By the time the cast leaves the stage before their second curtain call, any world they’ve created is long gone from our minds and hearts.

It’s difficult to point to what precisely makes this production such a depressing experience; the feeling is pervasive, running through the listless ensemble, the fact that it was programmed in the first place, and even David Mamet’s acclaimed 1984 script itself.

Much is made of Mamet’s burst-fire dialogue and invective — but what is it actually doing? The play’s Chicago real-estate salesmen, backed up against a wall by their company’s relentless demand for sales, descend into conniving manipulation and vicious diatribe. But what this production highlights is that for all Mamet’s facility with language, it is also, at its most basic level, just one man swearing at another.

It’s testament to Greg Stone’s abilities as one of the country’s most consistently fine stage actors that he at least can wring many satisfying moments out of the text as Moss. That said, Stone’s prowess is only made starker by contrast with the rest of the ensemble, with the exception of Alex Dimitriades, who makes the role of Roma his own, unencumbered by Pacino’s definitive performance in the film.

The language of playwrights with far more draconian notation allows their work to endure today (think of Beckett, with his commands for every shake, breath and turn of the head in Happy Days). Here, indulging Mamet’s fastidious attention to punctuation and rhythm has the effect of locking this production firmly in its mid-'80s context, but perversely without allowing a 2014 Melbourne audience a way into this world. It’s been 30 years since the MTC presented their first production of the play. There’s nothing intrinsically bad about choosing to program what is essentially a period piece, but there is in a production that offers nothing more.

There is so much that only live performance can do. Theatre interacts simultaneously with both the minds and hearts of an audience; it makes our world bigger, more full, because it lets us strain our lives past what we know. But watching this show was an hour and a half of the world just getting smaller.