American Buffalo (Wyndham's Theatre)

David Mamet‘s first international hit has been respectfully and self-consciously revived by director Daniel Evans with three terrific actors. The newness and originality of Mamet’s voice we now take for granted. But it still packs punch and magnetises star actors.

Damian Lewis returns to the London stage after five years spent enthralling television audiences as the double agent Brody in Homeland and as an inscrutable, bluff Henry VIII in Wolf Hall. Sliding down the social scale, he plays a street hoodlum, Teach, muscling in on a local robbery. He’s a joke of a shyster, and he knows it; he is very funny not so much for what he says as for how he struts. He’s the most gormless of three gormless amigos.

The other two are John Goodman, star of Roseanne and the Coen Brother movies, making a West End debut as the Chicago junk store owner Donny Dubrow, who hosts the play and the plot; and Tom Sturridge who comes 'Far From the Madding Crowd' to play the shaven-haired loser Bobby with a drug habit. Donny’s looking out for Bobby, maybe with more than a paternal interest, and it’s Teach who threatens both that equilibrium and the success of operation buffalo – the robbery of a prize nickel, emblazoned with a buffalo, that has passed through the store.

Goodman is the character who travels most in the play, and he does so with an unfussed grace, a slimmed down, untroubled version of his own screen persona, a gentle giant. Sturridge is similarly sedated, like some cherubic zombie who is drifting on whatever flotsam or current is passing by.

But it all needs a bit more savagery. Lewis, in a livid purple suit, and 1970s sideburns and moustache, is neither the rat-like desperado of Jack Shepherd in the National Theatre European premiere, nor the driven, fidgety maniac of Al Pacino in the West End thirty years ago; he’s a very funny poseur, an Engelbert Humperdinck of the low life, but a threat to the authenticity of Mamet’s "overheard" writing.

As a result, the evening lacks heat and real excitement, but not for want of production back-up: Paul Wills has designed a fantastically chaotic junk shop with a celestial ceiling of old chairs and bicycles, beautifully lit by Mark Henderson. And the actors channel the rhythms and cross currents of Mamet’s revelatory riffs about friendship, status games and shifting power play with a commendable brio.

There’s a political dimension in which business and crime are equally associated with profit. The play touches, too, on a nation’s ongoing preoccupation with break-in and surveillance, years after the Watergate scandal. Mamet’s obsession with cards and gambling sees Teach entering on a tidal wave of misogynist abuse about Grace and Ruthie who bested him at the poker game last night. Lewis makes this almost acceptable; Pacino made it horrendous.

The play’s all about violence, power, the rhythm of life as well as the rhythm of language. And the touching relationship at its heart – between Donny and Bobby – is anaesthetised into a pretty pieta at the final curtain. Cue standing ovation. But you never really feel that these three guys come from the same place, or indeed the same street.

American Buffalo runs at Wyndham's Theatre until 27 June