Why Remake Mamets Classic with Women? Critic Explains.

Glengarry Glen Ross (Old Vic Theatre, London)

Verdict: Testosterone-lite 

Star rating: 3/5 

Glengarry Glen Ross is one of the most macho plays in all of theatre, written by one of America’s most macho playwrights, David Mamet.

Its language is bluer than the air of an NFL locker room. Its characters have the graces of a cage fighting club. So why would anyone want to perform this coruscating drama, about bottom-feeding real estate salesmen in 1980s , with an all-female cast?

The actors themselves, in Patrick Marber’s direct and pacy production, are pretty much faultless.

Indira Varma blazes, and later trembles, as main ‘man’ Levene, desperate for leads, selling sub-prime property in Florida to gullible dupes. Her Chicago office is run by hard-boiled manager Williamson (Dorothea Myer-Bennett). Rosa Salazar (from the cyborg blockbuster Alita: Battle Angel) plays Roma, a motor-mouthed hustler (Al Pacino in the 1992 film).

Yet, for all the great qualities of the acting – including Nancy Crane as the more approachable Aaranow, and Mercedes Bahleda as Lingk (one of Salazar’s patsies) – the question remains: why would you?

Maybe it was fun to perform – and it is fun to watch. But at what cost? Having an all-female cast sanitises the toxic masculinity. And let’s not forget, it’s a play that dates back to a time when that sort of behaviour was still acceptable... and Mamet’s work revels in it.

The cast wear a gender-ambiguous range of cheap two-piece suits, with blouses for shirts, and necklaces for medallions.

Yet feminine touches such as high heels and shoulder scarves soften the edges of these hard-bitten spivs. The honk of a men’s changing room is largely deodorised.

But above all, it feels less dangerous. The threat that violence could erupt, as characters square up in pursuit of a fast buck, is gone.

The play isn’t diminished, but nor is it enhanced.

Why couldn’t the Old Vic have found (or commissioned) an equivalent play about women slugging it out in the grubby back streets of the American dream? Instead they’re offering something slick but decaffeinated, evasive and artificial.

Glengarry Glen Ross runs at the Old Vic theatre until July 18.

Slaughterhouse-Five (Southwark Playhouse, London)

Verdict: Hare-brained odyssey

Star rating: 3/5 

Slaughterhouse-Five, is a valiant attempt to adapt Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 cult novel of that title for the stage. It’s a unique and brilliant work, rooted in the American author’s survival of the Allies’ carpet bombing of Dresden in 1945.

Vonnegut and a handful of POWs were saved only by sheltering in the basement of the abattoir that was their prison.

His story charts that and the life of hero Billy Pilgrim, who becomes a wealthy optometrist with PTSD, and time travels through his life after being abducted by aliens.

Covering philosophy, history, sci-fi, and the American Dream, it’s a freewheeling yarn that could easily defeat this plucky young company of actors equipped with only khaki jumpsuits, a handful of props and low-rent video animation.

Ably lead by Patrick McAndrew as Billy, less might have been more and they should dial down the volume.

But, a bit like Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it’s a hare-brained song of despair that never loses hope.

Slaughterhouse-Five runs at Southwark Playhouse's Borough theatre until July 4.