Glengarry Glen Ross | Old Vic | ★★☆☆☆ 

David Mamet’s transformation from perhaps the most original and insightful American playwright of the late 20th century to a flag-waving, MAGA-supporting, anti-woke motormouth is… troubling. As a Mamet-head, this must be what it’s like for Trump supporters trying to enjoy 90 per cent of popular culture. 

It’s hard to overstate the influence of Mamet’s work, which helped usher a minimalistic, cinematic dynamism onto the stage. Aaron Sorkin would have been a student when Glengarry Glen Ross was first performed and it’s hard to imagine his work without the influence of Mamet’s most enduring portrayal of American masculinity.

Glengarry Glen Ross is a near-perfect send-up of fickle American capitalism. It sees a cast of shady salesmen fight over who gets to pitch worthless real estate investments to the biggest dupes, taking all the credit for their big scores and blaming their failures on a lousy system. 

So a version by director Patrick Marber, who last year directed this play on Broadway starring Bob Odenkirk as the over-the-hill salesman Shelley Levene and Kieran Culkin as the hyper-aggressive young buck Ricky Roma was a mouthwatering prospect. And the fact it features a gender-swapped cast – that’s got to be interesting, right?

Why is Glengarry Glen Ross cast gender-swapped?

The problem is, it’s difficult to pinpoint what the production is trying to say by gender-swapping the cast. Sure, these words often sound absurd coming from the mouth of a woman: the ridiculous, dick-swinging bravado, the childish aggression that underpins almost every line of the script, the utter inability of any character to perceive the world outside of their own myopic viewpoint… But this single – albeit astute – observation isn’t enough to carry a production and Marber’s play ends up feeling flat, a half-baked experiment in which every character feels like a caricature, often straining not to literally wink towards the audience.

The great thing about Glengarry Glen Ross is that, no matter how stupid and selfish and venal these men might be, their actions seem like a realistic portrayal of life on the bottom rung of the capitalist ladder. Without that realism, that jeopardy, it just seems… silly.

The production isn’t done any favours by the Old Vic’s current in-the-round set-up – used to such fantastic effect in recent shows including Arcadia and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – which necessitates a bare-bones stage providing few immersion-building distractions and leaving the actors with, quite literally, nowhere to hide. 

Thankfully Mamet is nothing if not succinct and this production races through its 85-minute run-time (as the lights dimmed a man beside me asked “is that the interval, then?”). As the characters in Glengarry Glen Ross are fond of saying, luck runs in streaks – I think Marber’s might have ended.

• Glengarry Glen Ross is on now at the Old Vic