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Reprinted from London's Daily Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/et?ac=000933649949939&rtmo=fMVoV0fs&atmo=99999999&pg=/et/98/2/14/btlake14.html .
Charles Spencer on an excellent production of David Mamet's first play, Lakeboat at the Lyric Studio, Hammersmith
HERE's your starter for 10: which two American dramatists began their careers by writing autobiographical plays about the tough life aboard boats? Eugene O'Neill's early career as a merchant seaman is well known. Until seeing this European premiere of David Mamet's first play, however, I had no idea that he too had served his time on the water.
Having worked as a steward on a Lake Michigan cargo ship in his student days, when he came to write Lakeboat, as a 22-year-old English Literature graduate in 1970, Mamet produced this vivid, typically foul-mouthed portrait of the men engaged in transporting steel across the Great Lakes.
There are eight characters in all: two officers, five regular crew and a young, observant student, clearly based on Mamet himself. The piece seems astonishingly assured and anticipates many of the playwright's subsequent themes and riffs. Unfortunately it's hard to tell just how much Mamet wrote in his early twenties and how much was revised when the play was dug out of a trunk and professionally staged in America 10 years later.
As always, it is the vigour of the language that comes over most strongly - brutal, demotic, yet somehow transforming inarticulate speech into something rich, true, even poetic. The other major element is Mamet's familiar obession - part attraction, part revulsion - with an unrepentantly masculine, macho world.
There are gripping set pieces here, on drink, bar-room brawls and, naturally, women, regarded, as so often in Mamet, as an almost alien species.""The way to get laid is to treat them like shit,"" one of the crew remarks, describing how, as an alternative to foreplay, he hit his first girlfriend in the mouth""and she's so surprised she didn't even bleed". That's archetypal Mamet - nasty, shocking, yet also unexpectedly funny.
There's no real plot, just a series of often fragmentary dialogues and monologues which lay bare character with spare precision. There is however a cleverly sustsained mystery about one crew member who has failed to join the boat. Was he rolled by a hooker, attacked by the mob, wiped out by the cops? All these theories are put forward with punchy conviction, and all are demolished in a delightful low-beat ending, where the humdrum truth is finally revealed. Mamet's point is that men need to make myths to ease hard and monotonous lives.
Aaron Mullen's excellent production boasts an evocative design by Melanie Allen and cracking performances. Jim Dunk is particularly good as poor old Joe, who has served 33 years and is now both ill and lonely. Simon Harris is compellingly horrible as the racist and aggressive Stan, Jon Welch's Fred is virtuosic in his accounts of rough sex and Joe May is touchingly self-effacing as the young student.
This may be early Mamet, but it's certainly not second-rate Mamet. Indeed both play and production strike me as being streets ahead of The Old Neighborhood, the playwright's alarmingly thin new piece now on Broadway.
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