Independent on Sunday, 20 July 2003
by Kate Bassett

**Thanks, Catherine

There's a buzz about Nick Hytner's National right now: his regime feels like a bold, new talent-hunting era. Bringing in the outr&eacut;e Fringe satire, 'Jerry Springer - The Opera', was the first canny move, and now we're onto NT debuts by top British actors - big names that Hytner's predecessors, rather surprisingly, failed to entice. Following on from the scintillating Robert Lindsay in 'Power', last week saw Kenneth Branagh treading the Olivier's boards for the first time in David Mamet's 'Edmond'.

This gritty yet oddly dreamlike tragi-comedy was first seen in the US in 1982. Branagh plays the titular husband, a staid business who suddenly desires another life (or perhaps death). Undergoing a mid-life crisis, Edmond informs his staggered wife that she is spiritually and sexually uninteresting, then he simply walks out and spirals down into New York's Hell's Kitchen. In this urban jungle, he pawns his wedding ring, hopelessly seeks satisfaction from whores, gets done over by cardsharps, is treated like scum and goes psychotic with what's ironically called a survival knife.

This is a short play of fragmentary encounters, which could be problematic, but, after a slightly feeble start, it becomes enthralling. This is partly due to Mamet's downbeat yet taut dialogue, and to the vertiginous speed of Edmond's fall to the lower depths. The shifts in tone are also prfoundly unsettling. Edmond's outraged, screeching wife (Tracy-Ann Oberman) briefly seems a farcical caricature, but you're a terrifyingly long way from that by the time Branagh's Edmond is savagely kicking a pimp unconscious and coming back to spit on his body, screaming "I hope you're dead."

Edmonds' festering rage at everyone's money-grabbing callousness and his increasingly bloody fits of violence, in fact compare with the grim horrors of Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment'. The implicit criticism is of capitalism. Edmond's racist rants are ferociously un-PC, as well - perhaps even more provocative than Mamet's anti-feminist drama, 'Oleanna. Uttered here by Branagh's Edmond, standing in underpants and looking like some crazed caveman, he might also be taken for a satirical portrait of your "great white American male", declaring war on anyone who seems threateningly different.

But then Edmond's final scene in jail, with a burly black cell-mate (Nonso Anozie), seems to move from retribution towards a kind of peace. For their relationship opens out into quiet, cranky philosophising about who can foresee a man's fate, and it ends up hovering between near-marital tenderness, hope and bleak despair.

Edward Hall's production, set in a concrete arena with a revolve, is both slick and visceral. Strong supporting performances include Nicola Walker as the wired waitress, Glenna. One patch drags, labouring the religious theme, the preacher scene having been extended from the script that I have. But that's a cavil, and Branagh's performance is a tour de force. He changes, effortlessly, from a stolid Everyman to a comic nerd, at one point stomping around in no pants at all, without enough cash to pay for sex. You might remark that Edmond is a kind of uncool Shackleton: the adventurer manque. But then his heftiness becomes frightening and predatory - before he is cowed again. It's a hell of a journey.