20.03.1997

Sour dreams

Kevin Watts reviews American Buffalo, written by David Mamet and directed by Lindsay Posner (the Young Vic Theatre Company at the South Bank, Waterloo, London)

The American playwright David Mamet’s American Buffalo, which first played Chicago in 1975, echoes Arthur Miller’s Death of a salesman in illumining the hollow centre of an American Dream beyond the grasp of most American citizens. The play dramatises a day in the life of three hapless and pathetic small-time crooks nursing small time ambitions - Teach, Bob and Don - as they plan a dime and nickel robbery. Yet the wish-fulfilling ‘bad faith’ and rhetorical rationalisations of the three men can barely conceal their inability to communicate, despite the real dependency of each upon the other or the sense of frustrated life chances.

Mamet’s exploration of a speech debased by the vacuous mongrelisms of an entrepreneurial possessive individualism has the Pinteresque pause. Its circular inanity, collides with the verbose fast talk of a seedy US downtown. The text then powerfully captures the three men’s marginal, masculine world - left high and dry, like the dead steel and auto towns of the American rust belt, by the flight of the American Dream somewhere else.

Yet in the Young Vic’s revival the play did not really take off until the second half. The set design of an inner city junk shop, strewn with the worn commodities and thus useless use-values - such as the shopping mall Mickey Mouse and the old typewriter - while evidently meant to convey something of the ephemera and detritus of Americanism, simply impeded any clear view of the drama on stage. Nonetheless the humour and pathos of Mamet’s indictment of the illusory meritocratic promise of the American Dream, and his articulate revelation of the inarticulacy of failure and its train of destructive consequences, shone through in the performances.

Kevin Watts