Daily Telegraph, 18 July 2003
by Charles Spencer

**Thanks, Jane

I sometimes have my doubts about the American dramatist David Mamet, revered though he is. Beneath the brilliant concision of his often brutal, sawn-off dialogue, just how much is going on? Is he actually much cop at plot, or characterisation? And doesn't he sometimes become embarrassingly pretentious?

Such reservations are swept aside, however, by this thrilling production of Edmond, first staged in 1982, and now revived with Kenneth Branagh in the title role as part of the National's Travelex £10 season. It's a play whose influence may not have been entirely healthy, inspiring an endless succession of pale imitations by young dramatists eager to emulate Mamet's walk on the wild side of sleazy big-city life. But in an overworked genre, this is the original, and the best, and it packs an amazing amount into its 75-minute running time.

The action is set in Manhattan, in the days before Mayor Giuliani cleaned the place up. The central character, Edmond, is a white, middle-class, 37-year-old businessman who, after consulting a fortune-teller, suddenly realises that he is sick of his wife and his life. He walks out on his marriage and descends into an urban hell of pimps, prostitutes, muggers and hustlers, where capitalism is red in tooth and claw, everything is for sale, and spiritual values are conspicuous only by their absence.

This is a play that taps into desires and anxieties most men must have experienced - the urge to kick over the traces and say sod it all to everyone, and the fear that having done so, we would never be able to make our way back to normality.

Edmond scarcely knows what he's doing. Having decided to leave his wife, he opts for the most hackneyed options - getting drunk in bars, going to massage parlours, and discovering that the underbelly of city life is more pitiless, and more dangerous, than he ever expected.

What's worse, he finds that his own veneer of conventional morality is pitifully thin. He viciously threatens an old woman on the subway, and takes huge delight in beating up a black pimp while hurling racial abuse. Then, almost unconsciously, he stabs to death the unemployed actress he has just slept with on the pathetic grounds that she won't agree with his point of view.

In Mamet's terse script, with no expletive deleted, all of this seems horribly plausible. Edward Hall's mean, lean production - with a cast of 20 fine actors offering a succession of sharp cameos in 23 short and shocking scenes - achieves a hurtling momentum, and Branagh is in superb form as the confused and wayward anti-hero.

Overweight, battered and increasingly desperate, the actor never loses sight of the normality that underlies Edmond's character. He makes the audience, or at least this member of the audience, horribly aware of how easily such awful things could happen with too many drinks on board, and how impossible it would be to turn back the clock.

I suspect that most of us, deep down, harbour a little worm of the mean-spiritedness, racism, and violence that explodes out of Edmond when he finds himself off the leash. In his perception that "every fear hides a wish", and that part of him longs for humiliation and imprisonment, Mamet touches on something deep and disturbing in human nature.

For all its darkness - and plays don't come much darker than this - Edmond is finally illuminated by shafts of light. Branagh is heart-catchingly vulnerable in the scene when his face suddenly crumples and he breaks down into tearful incoherence when he is finally forced to confront what he has done. And though some may find it implausible, or manipulatively sentimental, I found myself deeply moved by the glimpse of redemption and common humanity that ends the play.

Harrowing though it is, Edmond sends you out into the night with a conviction that spiritual possibilities may somehow survive in a corrupt and fallen world.