London Theatre Guide, 18 July 2003
by Tom Keatinge

**Thanks, Jude

David Mamet’s Edmond, featuring an inspired Kenneth Branagh in his first outing on the London stage for many years, is a powerful and provocative piece that races like a train through its 75 minute running time. The play’s 25 scenes race by, one after the other, moving Edmond deeper and deeper into trouble, more and more exhausted, until he finally finds solace in the most unlikely form of his prison cellmate.

Written in 1982, Mamet set his play amidst the sleaze of the New York City of that day, when pimps, prostitutes, card-sharps and muggers ruled the city’s streets, and policemen were more likely to aid and abet than deter and prevent. Edmond, having consulted a fortuneteller, decides that he is no longer going to be the downtrodden husband, and it is time to be straight with his wife, and so uses a futile argument as a platform to declare that their marriage has been loveless and sexless for too many years. He is going out, and he is not coming back.

And so the scenes follow, in rapid succession as Edmond, on a Dantesque trip into his own Hell, trawls the city streets in search of what he fears he has been missing throughout all his married years, expressing his white Anglo Saxon rascist and homophobic views to all who will listen. He visits seedy bars, massage parlours, knocking shops (and fails in his objectives in each), gets stiffed by a card-sharp, until finally he gets what he wants, only to murder his conquest in a fit of uncontrolled rage, leading ultimately to his apparent salvation in a jail cell.

The National’s Olivier Theatre is sparsely set by Michael Pavelka, with concrete dominating the stage, and piercing, probing lighting by Mark Henderson adding to the haunting theme of the piece. Whilst Branagh is undoubtedly the star of the show, the supporting cast of nearly twenty vignettes provide short bursts of action and reaction that allows the audience to be immediately immersed in each scene despite their brevity.

From any angle, director Ed Hall’s Edmond is a terrific piece of theatre, but if you like your theatrical experience to be condensed, powerful and to challenge all the human emotions, this is a must.