So Good at Being So Bad

Kenneth Branagh Makes a Triumphant Debut at the National in Mamet's
Classic Study of Male Alienation

The Observer, 20 July 2003
by Kate Kellaway

Kenneth Branagh's Edmond starts as no more than a voice in a suit. When he tells his wife - with only the fancy candelabrum and the mahogany table between them - that he is leaving her, he delivers the news in a monotone, as if he were stepping out to the shops. He cannot interest himself in his own narrative - his boredom is huge and amoral.

His wife (Tracy-Ann Oberman) produces a sound of childish surprise: an artificially high piping; her alarm has been set off and hysteria follows. The scene is comic but troubling: Edmond - already - is on automatic pilot, an emotional vagrant, about to lose all control of his life.

Control is crucial to David Mamet. He is a covert philosopher and here takes on free will versus determinism with pessimistic stealth and brilliance. What does the idea - or myth - that we are in charge of our choices signify?

There is, throughout Edmond, first performed in 1982, a fine tension between Mamet's perfect control of his own material and the chaos he describes. At the end of the play, Edmond wonders aloud whether he could have gone any other - better - way. And we wonder too. We have been held in hellish, although compelling, detention for an hour and a quarter without an interval. Nor are we let off the hook afterwards: Mamet intends that we oversee the inquest.

It is hard to imagine a more challenging role for Branagh with which to make his National Theatre debut. An actor must go to the brink of his abilities to play Edmond; this is exactly what Branagh does. He is outstanding, a man possessed: versatile, generous and brave. As Edmond goes down, Branagh starts to come up.

He surges to the surface with the recklessness of a new criminal. He is inflated by energy one moment, punctured the next. His stature keeps changing: sometimes, he swells like a giant; more often, he shrinks back to become a small, hyperactive, grey-haired boy, especially in the vignettes with prostitutes in which he repeatedly bargains for their business (he will part with his baggy underwear sooner than empty his wallet).

To be aggressive and naïve is to hold a losing hand - and Edmond is both. He is a racist, too, and when he kills a black mugger in self-defence, a lifetime of unexpressed prejudice pours incontinently forth.

A dance of death begins: the racist murder is followed by the killing of a young waitress he has picked up. The scene between Edmond and the waitress is galvanising. Edmond, high on death and sex, is not in control. He is almost a figure of fun, hopping about in underpants and one sock.

But Branagh shrewdly exploits the ridiculous: he makes absurdity an incongruous foil to violence and psychosis. Nicola Walker plays the neurotic waitress beautifully, like a film on fast-forward. And the scene contains an uncanny, almost magical, moment in which the waitress (an out-of-work actress) suddenly testifies to her love of the theatre. It is as if, for one heady moment, an escape exit has been identified, as though her remark could bring our nightmare to an end, permit us to acknowledge it as a fiction. Instead, it is the prelude to her death.

Mamet shows how an ordinary man may tip over the edge into madness: Edmond and the waitress board the hate bus together - and ride. They hate blacks, they hate gays - and eventually, of course, they hate each other. Edmond is like Macbeth without any forward planning (and with no catharsis in prospect) but Branagh attains to almost Shakespearean highs and lows and, against all the odds, keeps a glimmer of sympathy for Edmond alive in us as he abjectly presents himself, in a fast and garbled prayer, to God.

In his book Writing in Restaurants, Mamet noted the danger of trying to write plays that match up to any notion of reality. What a play must do instead, he argued, was serve its artistic purpose; to 'convince' was beside the point. He would surely approve, then, of Edward Hall's rigorous production. It is fiercely disciplined and advances smoothly. And we can only watch helplessly as the floor spins like Fortune's wheel and moves Edmond on.

The darkness did not lift this week. Rupert Goold's elegant production of Sunday Father is a penumbral play about divorce - and, incidentally, the last show to be overseen by Jenny Topper who, after 15 years as artistic director, is leaving Hampstead Theatre. It is set in Canada in a Jewish community and focuses on two grown-up brothers whose lives have been distorted by their father's desertion when they were children. Now history looks set to repeat itself as Jed's marriage breaks down - and his son becomes a bitterly contested property.

Adam Pettle writes with acrid integrity and the play seems driven by an anger which I assume to proceed from his own life. Alan, well played by Corey Johnson, is a choleric lawyer; Jed (the excellent Dan Fredenburgh) is a writer only pretending to be strong. Raquel Cassidy plays Jed's wife Amy with convincing self-control.

But the play suffers from being unrelentingly adversarial. It alludes to love, tells but does not show. It needed Mamet, who shows but never tells, to make it less convincing and more like art.


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