________________________________________
American Buffalo at the Young Vic
________________________________________
I was blown away by David Mamet's American Buffalo when it received its British première at the National in 1978. The dramatist's astonishing use of obscene street language and violent ellipsis to create a kind of wired urban poetry is both distinctive and wonderfully exhilarating.
Better still, though this is a play in which almost nothing happens - a robbery is planned in Act 1, then fails to take place in Act 2 - you are gripped throughout by the constantly changing tensions between the three characters. Bill Bryden, who directed the British première, has compared the piece to a card game, in which the audience is consantly asking itself "Who's winning?", "Who's on top?" as these desperate and hilariously incompetent thieves jostle for power and status.
Twenty years on, the play looks like a modern classic in Lindsay Posner's riveting production, which is superbly alert to the changing rhythms of Mamet's brutal, sawn-off dialogue.
What's also crystal clear is that, for all its verbal obscenity, this is a profoundly moral, slightly old-fashioned, left-wing play that has much in common with Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. The setting, a Chicago junk shop (marvellously caught in Joanna Parker's fascinating, cluttered design) could hardly be more symbolic of the failure of the American Dream. Here are all the material goods that were supposed to bring happiness, their very presence in the "resale" shop proving that they failed to do so.
Mamet also rams home (a touch too ponderously) the connection between crime and orthodox capitalist pursuits. His no-hope chancers constantly and unironically refer to the burglary as "business". The characters also stress that friendship and loyalty inevitably take second place when "business" is involved. "The freedom of the individual" means the freedom "to embark on any ****ing course that he sees fit . . . in order to secure his honest chance to make a profit," declares Teach, in a line that makes Mamet sound worryingly like Brecht.
Fortunately, the play's earnest thematic concerns take second place to the dynamism of the relationships between the characters. What's more, though Mamet may disapprove of their morals, there is little doubt that he warms to them as people. He is often compared to Pinter but his writing in this play seems charged with a wry affection that is beyond Pinter's scope.
The Chicago accents may be a bit rocky, but it is hard to imagine how Posner's production could be improved upon when it comes to intensity, humour and pathos. Douglas Henshall plays the greasy, motor-mouthed Teach like a man on an amphetamine rush, getting maximum value from Mamet's language while adding his own amazingly eloquent vocabulary of richly comic arm gestures. He's at once funny and terrifying. Neil Stuke captures the bruised vulnerability of Bob, the recovering teenage junkie who becomes Teach's victim in the chillingly violent final scene, but it is Nicholas Woodeson who provides the play's emotional centre as the junk-shop owner, Don. Don treats Bob like the son he obviously doesn't have, and then betrays him. Woodeson beautifully captures Don's tender concern for the boy in the earlier scenes, and his sense of guilt, grief and fury at the end. Thanks to his detailed, yet almost self- effacing performance, you emerge from American Buffalo feeling moved. Beneath Mamet's tough exterior beats an unexpectedly compassionate heart.
Daily Telegraph 22nd February 1997
It's a relief to return to tough, quickfire dialogue, that gives a compelling sense of people actually thinking out loud, in Lindsay Posner's excellent revival of David Mamet's superb American Buffalo at the Young Vic. The three petty crooks, who plan to steal an American Buffalo nickel, are vividly realised on a spectacular junk-shop set designed by Joanna Parker. Neil Stuke plays the hesitant Bob, answering a question "Because" and then just nodding and nodding as if the nods somehow amplified the argument. Nicholas Woodeson is impressive as a molelike, determined Don, and Douglas Henshall, chopping the air with his hands and involuntarily snorting mid-sentence, is a flighty, memorable Teach.
From Going Out February 1997
Over at the Young Vic, Lindsay Posner has a revival of David Mamet's American Buffalo, the play which 20 years ago shot several thousand volts through the American theatre and started us on the long, bloody march to Tarantino.
I'm still not convinced of this as a great play, but it does have an immense theatricality which is why presumably it has always appealed to such stars as Al Pacino (who has played it here) and Dustin Hoffman (who made the movie); the script turns if not on a dime then at least on a nickel, that being the Buffalo of the title and at the centre of an elaborate if ever more circular series of power games revolving around three small-time losers and a possibly valuable coin.
The star performance in Posner's production comes from the immensely powerful and charismatic Douglas Henshall, with Nicholas Woodeson and Neil Stuke in vital support; all of them, in a junk shop on Chicago's South Side, come to the conclusion that they can really only hope to survive as a family, no matter how dysfunctional. In that sense, American Buffalo owes a considerable debt, one I have never seen acknowledged by author or critics, to Arthur Miller's The Price which was also about the detritus of the American dream and the scavenger instinct; Mamet's is much the more immediately powerful of the two scripts, but I sometimes wonder if it will live as long as, say, The Caretaker to which it also owes an obvious debt in both characterisation and setting.
By Sheridan Morley 1997