THEATRE / A crazy way to make a living

THERE WAS once a highly respected Texan attorney whose mind collapsed when he was caught out in a real-estate fraud. But once inside the mental hospital, with its up-market clientele of crazy lawyers, oilmen and bank presidents, all still going through their professional motions, he promptly resumed business on a fantasy level and continued his life as though nothing had happened.

When I first heard this story, I thought it might make an interesting little play. I was wrong. It contained the seeds for two of the best plays of the past quarter-century - David Storey's Home (1970) and David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross (1983) - both of which resurfaced last week, defying you to distinguish sanity from madness.

Mamet's salesmen are supposedly the sane ones. Like the eminent Texan, they are unloading romantically named plots of useless land on starry-eyed home buyers. But within minutes of the torrential opening speeches, it is clear that they are also harbouring certifiable fantasies. These are all built into the roller-coaster language, with its violent swerves and self-interruptions, its combination of oafish brutality, formal courtesies and poetic flight. 'A salesman's got to dream,' runs Arthur Miller's famous line; but unlike Miller, Mamet goes along with the dream. In his characters, rat-like cunning co-exists with self-hypnotised belief in the product, and a fierce pride in salesmanship as a noble calling. When Shelley (James Bolam), the desperate old-timer, bursts triumphantly into the office after closing a deal, he recounts the event with the breathless awe of a missionary who has just won a soul for Jesus.

With its continual changes of perspective, this piece is ideally suited to the point-blank stage conditions of the Donmar, where Sam Mendes directs an impassioned company with surgical grip. In the original Cottesloe version I remember that the restaurant duologues in the first act appeared static and distant. Here, Mendes presents them on a slow-moving revolve (by Johan Engels) so that the silent partners - William Armstrong as the reptilian office manager, John Benfield as the dumbo with scruples - receive as much attention as the fast-talkers. But the whole show seems to be taking place on an imaginary revolve, successively bringing different aspects into view: from an exposure of the conspiratorial nature of professional life, to the cut-throat rivalry between the sales staff. They are allowed some dignity, as actors who must believe in their roles, and as foot soldiers who despise the top brass. Then the focus shifts again, and they shrivel into a malignant swarm in relation to the cheated client, Lingk (Keith Bartlett), a desolate figure who only walked into the trap because, for once, someone was friendly to him, and it happened to be a salesman. Roma, the salesman in question, is played by Ron Cook on a huge emotional arc embracing delicately seductive charm and sadistically insensate wrath. Even in as exemplary an ensemble as this, some performances are more equal than others.

That was certainly the case in the original production of Home, which became so completely the property of John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson as to eclipse the other characters and keep the play off the stage ever since. In David Leveaux's revival it emerges as a more even-handed piece, with sympathies divided between the two unfathomably reserved gentlemen and the two raucously forward women. If anyone sums up the shared plight of the hospital inmates it is Brenda Bruce as Marjorie, when her grin turns to a stone mask on the line that there's no point in going home as she will be locked up again.

By this time, the play has declared its subject as the attempt by people whom society has put away to create a society among themselves. When I first saw it, it made me feel ashamed of my glib idea of the nutty Texans. If ever an artist earned the right to a theme through force of imagination, it is Storey with this piece. The spell of its early scenes comes from the sight of an empty canvas filling with pattern and colour. Harry and Jack speak; but it is also the writer speaking, dropping anonymous phrases, like pebbles down a well, and

being rewarded with answering resonances from which the dramatic path takes shape.

Harry and Jack have no sub-text but Leveaux has the nerve to explore their weightless language by holding back the tempo to that of a slow bicycle race. Every detail tells as we watch them discovering who they are: Paul Eddington building up Harry's repertoire of twitches and world-weary inflexions; Richard Briers, beaming hopefully at anyone who will recognise his existence, and volunteering tit-bits of family history and bungled card-tricks. Their characterisation is an act of concealment, stretching a bandage of trivial normality over something too painful to acknowledge. Their voices are well-bred, they move like retired Army officers; but who knows who they really are? It is enough that in the company of Marjorie and Rowena Cooper's whooping Kathleen, the bandage begins unravelling and they weep. They have been wounded, they are being wounded, they will

be wounded again. Wonderful as Gielgud and Richardson were, they left you free to admire the verbal music. Here nothing comes between you and the characters' feelings.

In Rage, Richard Zajdlic anatomises an unhappy family through the mystery of its drop- out son, who may or may not have stabbed a WPC before committing suicide. The piece has the right title. From underdog venom, sexual jealousy, sibling resentment, maternal hysteria and the alcoholic loathing of the boy's GP father (Nicky Henson), Mike Bradwell's production transmits the full spectrum of English domestic anger. What it lacks is the technique of modulating from one state of rage to another in the sequence of jaggedly unprepared emotional reversals. Otherwise, good performances from Ian Curtis and Kevin Dignam, and a stunning silhouette set by Geoff Rose.

Domestic fury also fuels Peter Leslie Wild's revival of Emlyn Williams's Someone Waiting, a well-crafted psychological thriller of the 1950s, whose alienated young hero, murderously overbearing father and complaisant mother exemplify the Hamlet-derived genre of the 'clever young man and the dirty deal'. Williams's original touch is to bring in a

bereaved outsider - a compulsively apologetic nonentity, beautifully played by David Allister - as the instrument of vengeance. It is like seeing Hamlet upstaged by the Ghost.

With the speed of one of his own fantasy machines, Ken Campbell returns to the Almeida with Mystery Bruises, another one-man trawl through the paranormal, beginning with the transmission of extra-terrestrial messages through car hub-caps. Elsewhere he speculates on the power of cranial spinal fluid to give you other people's thoughts, 'like getting the wrong snaps back from Boots'.

Supposition aside, he reminisces on his short-lived Shakespearian career with a lecture on the Thane of Angus, whom he proves to be a dwarf last seen disguising himself as a bonzai tree, which gave me the most deliriously funny 15 minutes I have enjoyed this year.

'Glengarry': Donmar, 071-867 1150. 'Home': Wyndham's, 071-867 1116. 'Rage': Bush, 081-743 3388. 'Someone Waiting': Orange Tree, 081-940 3633. 'Mystery Bruises': Almeida, 071-359 4404.