Edmond

Synopsis

Played out in 23 quick fire scenes, Mamet's Edmond charts the rapid fall of a New York businessman who leaves his wife and job after a meeting with a fortune-teller. Freed from the responsibilities of his former life Edmond plunges into a sordid world of pimps, peepshows and prostitutes where he is mugged and robbed and embarks on a career of violence. It is only when he has lost everything that Edmond crawls out of the moral abyss and finds hope of redemption.

Our Review:

18 July 2003

"This world is a piece of shit. It is a shit house", says Edmond, the 37-year-old title character of David Mamet's pungent snapshot of urban alienation that follows him on an odyssey of self-destruction as he takes flight from his wife and his life.

After the West End's recent revival of Sexual Perversity in Chicago, Mamet's frontline report on the yawning gulf between male sexual fantasy and reality in a production that was full of artificial star posturing, this similarly brief play (it runs for just 70 grim but gripping minutes) resonates far more powerfully around a central performance by Kenneth Branagh in the title role that's as gruelling to watch as it is vividly inhabited.

Making his National Theatre debut in his first London stage appearance for over a decade - though he played Richard III in Sheffield last year - Branagh gives (and shows) his all. But it's the emotional nakedness he reveals in the character, as opposed to the fu...

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Latest User Review

USER: Whatsonstage.com (82.35.62.168) - 30 September 2003:

Kenneth Branagh is great in this play but it still has all the problems associated with Mamets writing, it is mysogenistic and racist and if this is meant to be ironic- making the audience laugh at themselves, then its just not clear enough, Terry King's fight sequences were appalling some of theworst I have ever seen, looked really staged and fake....

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