Branagh's Return Has a Real Bite

The Times, 18 July 2003
by Benedict Nightingale

You try to go forward, and proceed to go backwards. You free yourself, and end up even more trapped. You jump from the frying pan, and you’re in the fire. You run away from nurse and, yes, you find something worse. Those are the ironies that mark the play that last night brought Kenneth Branagh back to the London stage for the first time in a decade: David Mamet’s sweeping, swingeing attack on the American city and the American psyche, Edmond.

Edmond is pretty depressing to read: a brusquely picaresque trek through New York’s dire fleshpots that seems to suggest that the only darkness greater than the darkness outside is the darkness lurking inside the title character. But Edward Hall’s production is so energetic, pacey and well-acted, not least by Branagh himself, that I was gripped throughout. And who said that a play had to enchant, exhilarate or lift the spirits?

Told by a fortune teller he isn’t fulfilling his potential, Branagh’s Edmond promptly leaves his wife, only to be fleeced or frustrated by tarts, duped and beaten by a card-sharp and generally subjected to what, when the play appeared in 1982, was agreed to be the everyday callousness of Manhattan. It’s the cautionary tale of a drab suburban Candide, but with one big difference. Up from this besuited blank of a man come feelings to match the evils he encounters: a confused mix of racism, rage and self-pity that culminates in violence and a murder which Edmond, whose frenetic activity conceals a deep passivity, blames on his victim.With 23 scenes and locales from “adult” peepshow to whorehouse to subway to prison packed into its 75 unbroken minutes, the play needs a stark setting and punchy acting, and gets both at the Olivier.

Branagh’s performance doesn’t answer some of the superficial questions, such as why an educated bourgeois should be quite so ignorant of the world and himself, and it lacks the sexual hunger of an homme moyen sensuel who thinks that getting laid may be the solution. But it catches Edmond’s earnest curiosity, his growing bafflement, his escalating chaos, his animal fury, his hapless grief and, at the end, an odd peace.

And ugly though the play is, you will come to see what Mamet means when he says that his work is basically religious. By that I don’t just mean that Edmond is challenged by a fundamentalist preacher and a reproachful chaplain. This American Everyman, this worm in the rotting heart of the Big Apple, is actually searching for something not as material as his culture misleads him into assuming. But love, understanding and that sense of identity and belonging that the fortune teller invokes at the play’s opening all remain elusive: in Mamet’s America and maybe here, too.




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