Yep it’s a tough sell. A Pulitzer Award and Tony winning play by David Mamet on a small stage in Redfern. But. If the A.I.D.A. maxim of the play really works, there is no better example than GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS playing at the Actors Pulse. This production, uncodified by gender, is the work of the intermediate students of the school and it has the power and presence of uniformly excellent performances.
There’s a slow jazz trumpet faintly in the background as we see a cluttered, shabby office in front of us. Desks and rotary dial phones, a Reagan calendar and on the upstage door, a young Trump below an exhortation to the shabby inhabitants to close the deal. Real Estate’s the game … like the very desirable Glengarry and the past successes like Glen Ross Farms.
Blake enters, from the hellish mother agency she is all greed all the time and there to give this sales office the heads up. Heads will roll if this month’s targets aren’t met in a competition of sorts. Levine is the most at risk, she has slumped dramatically from her glory days. Roma is all good, his figures are up and he will get the pick of the leads on buyers for Glengarry. It’s all about the leads and Moss and Aaronow also want their share of the choice targets. Holder, protector and far from benevolent diseminatrix of the leads is Williamson, not a sales person but an office manager. Unscrupulous and as open to corruption and avarice as any of the people she deals with.
AIDA: Attention, interest, decision… action. David Mamet’s play weaves all of these to sell the story and these performers rise brilliantly to the complexity of that challenge. It’s a terrific production which has care and attention to detail in the set, the music, (unfortunately not in the always poor front of house at this venue), but most importantly in the acting. Each character is expressed in voice and movement which fits within the whole malice afore thought ethos yet brings a realism to the bad behaviour that never lets them off the hook.
Starting with Jena Luhrmann as Blake. She prowls and snarls with the complete believability of a glass ceiling breaker who has taken no prisoners on the way up. She speaks to each of the others with beautifully modulated distain for their acquiescent acceptance. She never breaks out of ball breaker mode to encourage, entreat or explain but this is no one-note creation. Luhrmann is a dynamo in this, her only appearance, and the opening monologue of the play.
The text is designed around long speeches by the characters and they all carry it off with an ensemble skill which is perhaps expected as they are studying the Meisner approach. In this specific scene, there up the back is Williamson, Claire Brew. She lurks around and spends most of her time listening and it is spot on for character. I especially enjoyed Brew’s performance for its complexity in attention. Constantly alert, she often leans while watching the nonsense through the eyes of someone with power who is finely attuned to the main chance.
And Levine presents her with that opportunity. Katherine Munro handles the fast-paced dialogue with skill and her adept work will take Levine from arrogance, through which we can smell the desperation, into wheedling and negotiating and a victory, to a kind of acceptance which is marvellous to watch. The physicality can sometimes be too pointlessly fussy as she is often paper shuffling but when she pulls herself up to height and spreads out, she is a force to be reckoned with. Terrific work from her in the undertow and implication of subservience in the American Express sequence, too.
In that scene she is supporting the swinging dick, Roma, a commanding performance from Tony Barea, to keep a sale. Barea is revolting in this role, he makes no apology for this noxious man and his equally poisonous views. It’s impressive work, not least because it is fucking full on … There is no grey area in the text and many would be just plain boring in such a role. Not Barea. His Roma stalks around and pontificates with the sure belief in his right to do so, he rapid fires the lines yet we see the wheels turning. Plus, Barea handles the rhetorical questions with absolute integrity.
There is a lot of horrid behaviour to go around in Mamet’s play but there is a steady hand at work in Director Billy Milionis who ensures the right ebb and flow to make the play engrossing in its repellence. This is especially so for the scene between Moss, Livio De Michiel, and Aaronow, Rebecca Leedham, where his particularly toxic brand of masculinity tidally overpowers her hard done by desperation and passivity.
The scene is completely performed sitting down yet gives no sense of boredom or ennui. De Michiel has that loudness and aggressive legs open crotch display physicality that completely demands her attention. Leedham brings out the yes man but her closed arms across the chest do little to repel his manipulations. She is ripe for exploitation and he is just the man.
The cast is rounded out by Dean Tuttle as Baylen the cop who I would not want to meet in a dark alley; Casey Richards as Roma’s soppy mark. And a shout out to Aiden Morrissey as the nameless assistant who proves there are no small parts! Good job man.
It might be a small stage but this group of students have risen spectacularly to the task. I’m sold … where do I sign?
GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS playing at the Actors Pulse until 3rd of March.