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Friday 9 January 2009

Sound effects

The hottest ticket of the year so far is Speed-the-Plow at the Old Vic. This fabulously slick piece of entertainment could run for a decade without an unfilled seat. David Mamet’s short sharp play dissects Hollywood’s twisted morality and by extension the corrupt money-lust of corporate America. Jeff Goldblum plays Bobby Gould, a newly promoted production executive whose ‘old friend’ Kevin Spacey shows up one morning to pitch him a surefire hit movie. Both look perfect. Goldblum is a super-smooth skinny-hipped sex god who shimmies and dances through his part. Kevin Spacey is an angry, unstable little spaniel nipping at his master’s heels. These are monstrous characters driven by motives they can’t control. They think greed virtuous, betrayal necessary, megalomania desirable, dishonour manly. Yet we feel for them because they’re so patently blind to their failings. Goldblum the movie mogul has to choose between Spacey’s lucrative action film or the pet project of his sex-bomb secretary whose art-house script foretells the death of the planet by radiation. When Goldblum backs her avant-garde bilge, the script makes a leap towards the incredible. Nevertheless I accepted it because the actors’ heroic energies had bulldozed the last shreds of my disbelief. In the final act there’s one banal line, ‘We have a meeting’, which changes the entire direction of the play. Amazingly self-confident writing. Ditto the performances. Goldblum and Spacey must be one of the great double acts of American theatre. And they’re over here. Praise the Lord.

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