In David Mamet's plays there are no relationships, only transactions, whether of bodily fluids, words or greenbacks. This pairing of Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Mamet's sour, mid-1970s vignettes featuring men and women whose communication skills are limited to sexual intercourse, with the 1985 short The Shawl, looks rather odd on paper. And yet it works extremely well in slick stagings by Angus Jackson, even though the actors occasionally mash the distinctive rhythms of Mamet's language.
Something interesting has happened to Sexual Perversity. A play that once shocked with its exposé of men and women's failure to connect, their retreat into sexual fantasies, and the objectification of women's bodies, now seems a tad tame, almost cute. In our own Loaded, Maxim and FHM culture, thinking and talking about women the way Danny and Bernie think and talk about women is the accepted norm. Today's ladettes even happily join in, claiming that pole dancing is the road to liberation.
Jackson quite rightly keeps the play in its platform-heeled and cheesecloth era. The production is a reminder of how little feminism really affected ordinary people's lives then, and how little impact it has had on sexual relationships now. What is harder to work out is whether a modern audience is laughing at Mamet's quartet of inadequates or with them. Judging by the whoops of delighted recognition around me, a bit of both. Creepy.
The Shawl is one of Mamet's confidence-trick dramas. A troubled woman visits a clairvoyant, played here by the silver-haired, silver-tongued Michael Pennington. The clairvoyant is clearly a charlatan, but he also appears to be telling her truths. This edgy miniature is a play for our own uncertain times, capturing our increasing need to know and to eliminate all risk from our lives.
Both plays are performed with a calculated and slippery nonchalance by terrific actors. And both of these little plays fill the vast Crucible stage with surprising ease. If there is one thing the venue's associate director Michael Grandage has taught us, it is that big spaces shouldn't be viewed as problems but as gifts.
Until November 24. Box office: 0114-249 6000.
