Sometimes a show really is about the stars. The most intriguing aspect of Daniel Evans’s production of American Buffalo is in seeing figures recently familiar on screen take on full fleshy stage life. David Mamet’s 1975 play features three chaps planning and failing to rip off someone else, and in the process ripping each other to pieces. It echoes early Pinter but lacks the rich peculiarity – and the sinisterness. It is hard now to credit the claims for the play as a mirror of American materialism. It looks more like three men beating up their environment and mashing up their language.
The real revelation is Damian Lewis. Gleaming from Homeland and Wolf Hall, he turns out to be a natural comedian. A comedian who uses his bonhomie to conceal uncertainty. As the manipulating centre of Mamet’s heisty drama, he summons up the period with every self-conscious shift of his limbs. He looks as if he’s been shoehorned into his maroon trews; a startling moustache seems to have flown in from some other face and landed upside down. The walk is absolute 70s dandy, not so much a saunter as a dangle. John Goodman is more of a presence than a personality. The great glowers and sudden grins that have made him so compelling in the Coen brothers movies – and Roseanne – are muted here, sometimes scarcely registering. Tom Sturridge, about to be fan-besieged as Troy in Far from the Madding Crowd, has always been a bewitching stage actor. Shaven-headed and round-shouldered, druggily twitching, he is faintly touching and very unsavoury as the youngest of this hapless trio. He looks as if he has swum into the action down a U-bend.
