Romance

In 1997 a little musical arrived in London from Broadway called Romance Romance, and it quickly inherited the name that gossips there had dubbed it, “No chance no chance” (and promply lived up to it, folding just seven weeks later). David Mamet‘s new play, simply entitled Romance and now at the Almeida after its New York off-Broadway premiere in February this year, could in turn be accused of having no substance.

This paper-thin courtroom farce has neither an anchor in reality nor a respite in humour. Hot on the heels of visiting the scene of an American military courtmartial in Aaron Sorkin’s A Few Good Men, Mamet’s play now takes us to a far more implausibly constituted New York courtroom, where a Jewish chiropractor (Nigel Lindsay) is on trial. We never discover why: there’s something to do with his having been in Hawaii on 10 November the previous year, and a drawing in his diary of a rabbit is put forward in evidence, but we never find out what for.

Mamet has always been fond of breaking rules in his plays, and now breaks another: that farce should follow some kind of inherent logic, with a sense of order that’s rigorously established and then anarchically broken down. Here, without the facts, we have nothing to go on. So what precisely is at stake?

In fact, quite a lot, it seems. Mamet uses the warring factions of the courtroom as a microcosm of the difficulties of the Middle East peace process, a conference for which is simultaneously taking place in New York while the case unfolds. As Bernard, the gay lover of the prosecuting lawyer who has a whole lot of grievances of his own to unload onto his partner, shouts when he storms in to the court, “How can you have peace in the Middle East when you can’t have peace in your home?”

But if the formula for peace in the bedroom, courtroom or the Middle East eludes them – despite a novel idea from the chiropractor – the play ultimately lacks enough of a dramatic or comic spine to engage us. Instead, Lindsay Posner‘s frenetic production plays it loud and fast in the hope that it’ll all pass by so quickly and noisily that we won’t notice the absence.

Posner’s expert cast rise to the challenge above and beyond the call of duty, lobbying Mamet’s trademark verbal volleys at each other with enough energy (and volume) to drown out the absence of laughter. Frasier‘s John Mahoney – previously seen on the London stage in a short run of Steppenwolf Theatre’s production of The Man Who Came to Dinner – mugs to good effect as the befuddled, pill-popping judge, with Colin Stinton and Nicholas Woodeson as the opposing lawyers and Paul Ready as the prosecutor’s boyfriend valiant in the face of the adversity of the play itself.

– Mark Shenton