Sunday Telegraph, 20 July 2003
by John Gross

**Thanks, Catherine

A New York businessman who is called Edmond (somewhat whimsically - his surname is Burke) consults a fortune-teller. She tells him that he isn't getting enough out of life, so he goes home and tells his wife that he hasn't loved her for a long time and is leaving her there and then. Mrs Edmond seems a fairly tiresome person, but one undoubted moral of the 75 minutes that follow is that he would have done better to stay put.

David Mamet's 'Edmond', which dates from 1982, and is now being presented at the Olivier Theatre, is a short play, but it packs a great deal in. Moving out almost robot-like into the night, the newly liberated Edmond starts searching for pleasure in its more rudimentary forms - in a clip-joint, a peep-show, a massage-parlour. He is oddly naive (he allows himself to be taken in a by a very obvious card-trick) and at the same time tight with his money: he haggles in situations where you are probably best advised not to. But he persists in his odyssey even so, along a path that quickly leads to murder.

Flying into a rage because she won't play a conversational game with him, he kills a girl he has just slept with. When he finds himself in jail, it is with the feeling that "I always knew I would end up here." That doesn't mean, however, that he has anticipated the treatment he promptly receives at the hands of his black cellmate.

While the story no doubt has had its real-life counterparts, the play is essentially a bad dream: Edmond doesn't exist outside the destiny Mamet has scripted for him. But it's a collective bad dream, which we can all surely entr into, and it is lent epic force by the concentrated skill of Mamet's writing. Even the slighter scenes - in a pawnshop, say, or a hotel lobby - have a tautness which makes you hang on every word. Only at the very end is there a lurch into sentimentality.

At the Olivier, Edward Hall's production has a pace and punch that match the text, and it features a memorable performance in the main role from Kenneth Branagh. The ordinariness, the puzzlement, the sense of numbness are there from the beginning. The anger, the self-pity and the pleasure in lashing out come later - ugly forces, stirred up by the ugly tricks which the city has played on him. It is a grim progress, and one which Branagh conveys with a rare power.