Glengarry Glen Ross

As a young man, David Mamet worked for a real estate agency that sold worthless undeveloped land to gullible citizens, and his Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece Glengarry Glen Ross is loosely based on his experiences. What he saw in that scam operation was both the sort of greed that made people happily willing to ruin the lives of others, and the way that the salesman used language to manipulate their victims and their colleagues.

The language of Glengarry Glen Ross is certainly distinctive, but it isn’t polished or poetic: the men depicted are ugly men who use words to bully and hurt, and for that reason Mamet makes their language ugly, too. While there is a famously large amount of swearing in the show, Mamet brings artistry to this profanity, and what we end up with is what’s known in the theatre world as ‘Mamet speak’ – language which is urban and masculine and aggressive, but also broken and fragmented and jagged and incomplete and odd and absurd. It’s the toxic language of a toxic culture: the ugly poetry of the ugly, modern world.

When the characters make racist remarks smugly and casually, they sound a warning for today’s audience about what happens when a society tolerates racism, or makes it easier to deliberately offend and belittle. But if the language is sometimes confronting, it’s also frequently comic: Mamet asks us to look at these men with disapproval if not disgust, but he also invites us to laugh at them – at how weak and pathetic and silly they are.

While the play’s wild combination of bad language, rapid-fire dialogue, dark satire and light comedy made bringing these characters to life a significant challenge, the seven cast remembers responded with admirable enthusiasm and diligence, creating performances of depth and distinction. As the ever-anxious Levene, Benjamin Desjardins (V) was wonderfully intense and manic, while, despite his youth, Oscar Handelsmann’s (III) Moss was convincingly self-serving, gruff and brooding. Michael Zeritis (IV) made office manager Williamson appropriately cold and soulless, and Sebastien Power (IV) gave the hopeless Aaronow an ever-amusing bewilderment. As the weak and gullible Lingk, Patrick Busan (V) was always goofily overwhelmed, while Will Armstrong (V) provided a counter-balancing dose of reality with his bored and sometimes annoyed detective, Baylen. And holding all of this together was Chico Nunes’ (IV) remarkable, larger-than-life Roma, the embodiment of the collective investment in empty words and self-importance. It says much about these young actors that, despite the abundant difficulties, they always worked as a happy ensemble, determined to master their parts, but determined, too, to have fun along the way.