Someday I hope to once again give a play at Hampstead a solid-gold, unqualified rave, but today is not that day. Richard Bean’s unnecessary adaptation of David Mamet’s noirish 1987 film, about a Chicago psychiatrist enthralled by a con artist, continues this once-vital new writing venue’s long run of middling to mediocre shows.
Sure, it’s on the upper end of that spectrum: an efficient, tense piece of work. But the story loses a great deal of its jeopardy and sexual tension in the translation from page to stage. A coolly remote Lisa Dillon and a ferrety Richard Harrington seem barely engaged by the thrill of deception - of pulling a long con and fleecing a mark - let alone aroused by each other.
Dillon is Margaret, a Harvard shrink who’s written a bestseller about compulsive behaviour. When a rich-kid client starts waving a gun around, claiming to have incurred a vast debt at a sleazy poker bar called The House of Games, she improbably decides to go down there and sort things out. The denizens are a dimwit Hell’s Angel, a courtly older gent, an obnoxious fatso and Harrington’s stubbly, fag-choffing, fast-talking Mike.
When they try to game her she calls their bluff but she’s stimulated by their edgy existence and by Mike’s attentions, his invasions of her personal space and her mind seeded with his con-artist’s insinuating sweetener: “I like you.” She gets into bed with him, and – metaphorically – with the whole crew for a new book, about the confidence trick as a metaphor for American life.
Both film and play rely on multiple plot twists and shifts of perception over who is exploiting whom, and on the idea of an upstanding figure energised by a walk on the wild side (see also Henry IV, Equus, 50 Shades). The film seemed arch and stagey back in the day but this does not make it a natural fit for the theatre, where the audience is more complicit in the suspension of disbelief.
The story feels more arch, more stagey in Jonathan Kent’s production. Bean says in the programme that Mamet’s ending would feel un-earned in the theatre, so he invents a different one, which is awful and phoney and also un-earned. I’m not sure when his version is meant to be set, either.
The dialogue and the sexual politics still have a brutish 80s tang, but the fashions and the crappy mobile phones with their stubby antennas and complete lack of coverage suggest the early 90s. Then again, Margaret can dictate and send email from her Apple laptop (mid-to-late 90s, maybe?) and there’s a reference to “Sarah Palin and Barack f***ckin’ Obama”: the earliest citation of those two together is in 2008.
In a play about the artful presentation of falsehood as truth, this is careless. At least we can be thankful that Kent and Bean leave it up to the audience to decide how much this all applies to contemporary America and the wider world.
Dillon has an aloofness that initially feels fitting for Margaret but never really changes. I didn’t believe at all that she’d throw in her lot with this bunch of losers. Especially Mike. Harrington is a broodingly fine performer, but here seems precisely lacking in the charisma and skin-deep danger the part requires.
The supporting cast is full of excellent character actors valiantly trying to flesh out cardboard figures. I liked Robin Soans as the gentlemanly Joey and Andrew Whipp as the thuggish Bobby, even though it’s inconceivable that they could ever work a successful con together.
This adaptation of Mamet’s film is a perfectly acceptable piece or genre fiction but frankly there’s no need for it to be onstage.
Hampstead Theatre, to June 7; hampsteadtheatre.com
