After a two-week delay, David Mamet’s new Broadway play China Doll, starring Al Pacino, has finally debuted to tepid reviews.
Following the extended preview period, some were sceptical about the show, which has Pacino playing a billionaire named Mickey Ross who is getting ready to join his fiancee in Toronto before an unexpected phone call interrupts his plans. But producers assured the public that the delay “allows the creative team additional time to work on the play before its world premiere”.
Despite this extra time, critics credit Pacino’s previous work as the main draw for audiences, rather than his performance in China Doll, which many say includes stuttering and grasping for his next line. He is joined by Christopher Denham, who portrays his assistant, and whom the Wrap calls “merely a prop”.
Ben Brantley, The New York Times
One of the biggest problems (though not the only one) in comprehending China Doll is that Mr Pacino’s lurching, stammering performance is not easy to follow in terms of content, character or subtext. There has been more than enough evidence in the past to certify that Mr Pacino is a bona fide genius, so let’s assume that there are reasons for what he’s doing here.
Certainly he [Pacino] gravitates toward roles like this and in his prowling posture, bent at the knees, but slightly stooped at the waist, you can read the depredations of old age or the crouch of a fighter, just waiting for his chance to spring. But he often seems distracted, stuttering over his sentences. And when he works himself into high dudgeon, many of the lines feel as though they have quotation marks around them – that he is Al Pacino playing Al Pacino playing Mickey Ross, because that is what the crowd, who applaud loudly at his arrival, ostensibly want.
Ross bares his feral nature when he’s describing his payback plans for the idiots who screwed up his careful plans to evade paying US taxes on his new plane. Mamet loves writing this kind of savage dialogue and Pacino loves delivering it.
What’s most fascinating about China Doll is Mamet’s leisurely drawn-out exposition. For most of the first act, Ross sounds much like a housewife complaining on the phone about a newly installed carpet that isn’t the right colour now that it’s in her living room.
David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter
Much has been written in theater gossip columns about Pacino having trouble with his lines in a play that’s essentially a series of monologues, with interruptions from a secondary character that serve as prompts. But the fatal weaknesses are in the writing, not the performance. Mamet talks down to his audience, clubbing us over the head with our colossal stupidity for resenting the obscenely wealthy when the play suggests it’s the hypocritical liberal politicos whose Machiavellian shenanigans truly deserve our contempt.
Plays depending on phone conversations with unseen participants are almost always a bad idea, and China Doll is no exception. However, bad as it is (and worse still after the intermission), China Doll has one major asset, and that is the star’s unrequited commitment. It may be a dopey play that keeps tripping over its MEGO-inducing minutiae, but Pacino delivers every line with relish, with mustard, onions, the works.
The construction of China Doll is most peculiar. Very little conflict unreels in our presence. The only character we encounter directly, other than Mickey, is his pearl-gray beanpole of a right-hand man, so suavely deferential it may well be a Downton Abbey joke that his name is Carson.
Terry Teachout, the Wall Street Journal
It turns out to be a strongly wrought story of considerable moral complexity, one that will hold your attention all the way to the brutal end. I can’t yet tell you whether it has the legs of American Buffalo or Glengarry Glen Ross, but I do know that I want to see it again—and while I believe Mr Pacino has failed to do it justice, I’m still glad I got to see him give it a try.
Brendan Lemon, Financial Times
It’s a great joy to watch Pacino hold the stage for two hours. He may be aided by teleprompters and his energy may flag here and there — but his character, an ageing business magnate, is supposed to sputter.
