Aural Fixation
EDMOND. David Mamet. Olivier Theatre.

Times Literary Supplement, 25 July 2003
by Judith Flanders

Cezanne is supposed to have said of Monet: "He is only an eye -but what an eye!".

It may very well be that in a hundred years' time, David Mamet will be remembered as "only an ear -but what an ear!". His ability to recreate the patterns of everyday speech verges on the uncanny. One would not, however, look to Monet's depictions of the Houses of Parliament for a better understanding of democracy; nor should Mamet's ability with naturalistic speech encourage his audiences to read into his work more intellectual content than it can in reality carry. This is not to suggest that Mamet is not a great playwright. He may indeed be the greatest of his time. But it is worth asking in what that greatness consists.

Edmond, his 1982 exploration of the dark underbelly of city life, is a good place to start.

It is not an intellectually satisfying work: intended as a fable, it has many of the inbuilt weaknesses of fable, including wafer-thin characterization and motivation. Edmond (Kenneth Branagh) is a middle-aged man who, after an unsettling meeting with a fortune-teller, impulsively leaves his wife (the excellent Tracy-Ann Oberman) and descends into a nightmare world of pimps, prostitutes, cheats and cons. Mamet's ear can persuade us that he knows the dark side intimately, but it is revealing that the most successful scene is Edmond's meeting with a waitress-cum-actress; for the first time, we actually believe that both Mamet and his actors really know about the thing that they are representing.

Elsewhere, in the many scenes of great brutality and vicious language, there is a faint whiff of middle-class people simply being rude; listening to the "cunts" and "coons", I found myself thinking more than once of Flanders and Swann's famous chorus, "Pee po belly bum drawers". Mamet's tough-guy writing persona is a pastiche which persuades gentle liberal nerds that, with his help, they too can live on the edge. Yet the violence itself is stylized throughout, as befits a morality tale. After Edmond assaults a pimp (Jude Akuwudike) and murders the waitress (another fine performance, from Nicola Walker), he achieves a kind of peace in imprisonment. His cellmate (Nonso Anozie, excellent in a potentially unrewarding part) first rapes him, then lives with him in a mock-marriage, complete with separate beds and good-night kisses: Edmond has returned to his wife.

The Olivier Theatre is not ideal for this televisual-style drama of twenty three short scenes. It is too vast and echoing, but the number of seats in the auditorium for Kenneth Branagh's first return to live theatre in eleven years was obviously the prime consideration. That decision made, the director Edward Hall and designer Michael Pavelka have come up with an effective solution. A revolve spins each new character towards Edmond; the world of the play is bounded by a grey cement wall that imprisons the characters while it completes the semi circle of the Olivier. A neon-lit bar, a desk, a table and chair stand in for the interiors just as the pawnshop owner, the cardsharp or the barfly are paradigms of the city's night-time population.

The thirty parts are not doubled or tripled, as Mamet initially conceived. This seeming largesse is in fact a loss. It was important in the original production that the same actress played both Edmond's wife and waitress-victim: the woman Edmond thought he had travelled so far emotionally to discover turned out to be no different from the one he had left behind, and both grew out of his disturbing meeting with the fortune teller (again the same actress). The audience watched Edmond go round in circles. Here, with a new actor for each role, one may be deluded into thinking that Edmond is moving forward.

Branagh's decade away from live theatre has not dimmed his extraordinary powers. I was unpersuaded by the early Edmond, sleepwalking through his scenes, where Branagh affects a curious Midwestern drawl -Andy Williams after a few tokes, perhaps. But Branagh's curiously un-sexual persona, often a drawback, makes Edmond's later pursuit of purchased sex and his two tamely domestic marriages seem all too sadly believable. In all Mamet's work, sex -whether given or paid for - is not about desire or sensuality, but power. And once Edmond assaults the pimp and moves into manic mode, there is no doubting Branagh's ability to carry the audience with him. Suddenly speeded up, he is flying: his breathing changes, his centre of gravity shifts, moving him upright and forward. Edmond is alive for the first time. The scene of remorse before his arrest for murder, added since the 1985 production, is neither artistically satisfying nor dramatically coherent, but Branagh's technically assured performance makes you feel that it is both.




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