Al Pacino as the murderer Phil Spector: “Mamet has long been interested in defending the indefensible” (© Startraks Photo/Rex Features)
When David Mamet’s Race opened on Broadway in 2009 it promised a return of the vital playwright, he of the tough guy, the short con, the invective-studded dialogue. The one audiences had been missing for at least a decade. Race, which receives its UK premiere in June at the Hampstead Theatre, tells the story of three lawyers (a black man, a white man and a black woman) arguing about a case in which a white man may have raped a black woman.
The play contains a couple of surprising elements for Mamet. The first is the woman lawyer, who seems clumsily conceived to counter years of accusations that Mamet is unable to write female characters. Another is its subject: it is the first time Mamet has tackled race head on. At the same time the play is vintage Mamet—hairpin plot twists, pugnacious poetry, and shrewd observations about what Henrik Ibsen once called “the life lie,” the deceptions people tell themselves to make it through the day.
And yet, despite these virtues, Race still leaves Mamet, author of some of the best dramatic writing of the 20th century, lagging behind the complicated concerns of the 21st. What has gone wrong—and is Mamet capable of a return to form?
Born in Chicago in 1947, Mamet first burst onto the scene in 1975 with American Buffalo, the best play about failure since Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Next came the big successes, Glengarry Glen Ross (1984), Speed the Plow (1988), and Oleanna (1992), each dazzlingly attacking a piece of common wisdom about America. Wielding his distinctive tough guy idiom—“Action talks, bullshit walks!” says Don, the junkstore owner in American Buffalo—Mamet shredded capitalism, feminism, Hollywood, anything that got in his way.
By the 1980s, Mamet had also begun to write and direct films. Several of these—House of Games (1987), Homicide (1991), and The Spanish Prisoner (1997) —brilliantly transfer his theatrical obsessions, especially his love of the 11th-hour con game, to the screen. But then in the 1990s, Mamet started writing prose, including a series of polemics against university, anti-semitism, and, it seemed, theatre itself. During this period, the quality of his plays began to decline—they often seemed inert, fanciful or strangely tin-earred.
Mamet has been a victim of his own success. His once unique octane-laced style has been so absorbed into the culture that it is now about as common as petrol. In this respect, he is in good literary company. Think of Edward Albee, who had to write a play about a man in love with a goat to get audiences to forget his incisive early work such as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Or Harold Pinter, whose sinister absurdism turned political in later plays such as Ashes to Ashes. For Mamet, as for all writers who make a deep impact with their early work, the problem is how to do something new without losing the thing that made them special.
Mamet’s slide from cultural icon to cliché may be partly a matter of timing. His classic study of male-female power relations, Oleanna, premiered in 1992, months after the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill case in which, during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Thomas was accused of sexual harassment. By contrast, Mamet wrote Race shortly after the election of the nation’s first African-American president. The point of the first play is that the rules about men and women have totally changed; the point of the second play is the rules about race have not. The second point may be true, but you can guess which makes for better drama.
Many critics believe there is a third obstacle to Mamet finding his voice in the 21st century: his politics. Always hungry to offend liberal pieties, in 2011 Mamet published The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, a collection of polemical essays about his rightward political turn. While Mamet’s best plays leave the audience gasping at their rhetorical and logical leaps, the essays in The Secret Knowledge, lashing out at liberals and feminists and praising Milton Friedman, leave the reader longing to set the pages on fire. Writing in the New York Times, Christopher Hitchens called it “a straw book.”
And yet I don’t hold Mamet’s political transformation entirely responsible for his weakened dramaturgical mojo. He began floundering years before his political conversion. Besides, righteous fury has always been a catalyst for Mamet’s work. The problem is not his reactionary turn, but his overwhelming lust to assert. Mamet has lost the ability to argue from both sides, as his most violent and affecting plays do.
Take Phil Spector, the recent television film Mamet wrote and directed about the murder trial of the legendary record producer. On the surface, Spector seems like a good Mametian subject. The music producer, who has been rich and famous since he was 18, is currently in prison for murdering actress Lana Clarkson in 2003. In the film, Mamet wants, as always, to drag the audience’s sympathy from point A to point Z. He wants the audience to first be revolted by Spector and then to believe in his innocence. He wants to show that Spector was convicted for his eccentricity, as opposed to the evidence.
It’s a promising idea but Mamet makes little effort to persuade. Spector is such an outlandish character that a convincing fictional treatment requires the writer to make him more sympathetic, or at least understandable as a person. Instead, Mamet, never interested in psychology, (which might provide a backstory, however flimsy, to relieve us from the character’s unrelenting villainy) gives us a sort of cartoon, fleshed out by Al Pacino’s exaggerated performance as Spector.
Mamet has long been interested in defending the indefensible and attacking the unattackable. Now too much of the time he is like the black female lawyer in Race, who, when asked by the white male lawyer how she knows her version of the facts would have won over the jury, asserts—as opposed to argues—her case with what in her mind is unassailable certainty: “Because, White Man, he was guilty.” Unless Mamet remembers the virtue of uncertainty, his late work will continue to be a pale imitation of his early successes.
