• Bitter Wheat, 6/13/19 (Thurs), London West End

O, Mamet, where is thy sting? A show satirizing the Harvey Weinstein affair should be a breeze for the ever-caustic playwright David Mamet, who has had plenty of experience skewering Hollywood on stage (Speed the Plow), page (Bambi vs. Godzilla) and screen (Wag the Dog) and has presumably dealt with Weinstein himself at some point. So what happened?

Here, a major film producer invites an aspiring young British actress of Korean descent to his hotel room to discuss her script, at which point his staff discreetly exit to give their boss private time with his prey. So far, so Harvey. But what seems on the page a promising setup for Mamet’s poison pen deflates within the first minutes to a soggy unstructured mess. The producer tries to be nasty, he really does, but the dialogue, usually Mamet’s strong point, is rambling. He tries halfheartedly to manipulate the actress with both sweet talk and threats of sorts, but is portrayed as forgetful and inattentive to detail like an aging man, a curious choice for a Hollywood power; it makes him seem ditzy rather than carelessly cruel. His barbed insults to the writer in the opening scene, his confusion between Korea and China, his demand for changes in the script (including an off-the-cuff suggestion that it be called “Bitter Wheat” — hence the title), his casually insulting comments to the intern from Belize – Mamet probably intended this to be edgy, but it just sounds like someone trying too hard to be edgy. It became tiresome.

One problem is the serious disconnect between the maliciousness of the words and the flat performance (more below), but worse is the disconnect between the stage business and reality. Weinstein was by all accounts a brute, but even he wouldn’t come up with a line like “I’m going to masturbate, and you’re going to watch” – he would just do it. And why does the woman not escape when a stranger with a gun enters the room and explicitly tells her she can go? Beats me. Satire has to be grounded in real life, but the sequence of events simply doesn’t make sense, while the dialogue is largely random comments that never gel into a whole. Every now and then a funny line will slip in, though I’m not sure the British audience got it all (“How did he know she was Jewish?” “She was shopping at Bergdorf’s”). But a line or two isn’t enough if the joke doesn’t come from the character or situation. When it’s reported that a Syrian terrorist has killed the producer’s mother, a plot line devised to show the producer’s callousness (he shrugs it off), I was ready to pack it in. The story was strained. As a result, despite an audience fully prepared either to laugh or be shocked, the show accomplished neither.

The problem was exacerbated by a limp performance by John Malkovich, making a much-anticipated return to the British stage after several decades. The actor took a laid-back approach that was not at all in synch with what is written as an explosive, domineering character. The role requires an over-the-top, no-holds-barred treatment, but the actor’s line readings were way too soft to sound threatening. How the heck did he get to be so rich and influential? It does not feel like someone with anything at stake, even after he is accused of rape and loses control of the company. He was drained of energy, like a balloon with the air let out. Screaming egomaniacs are all over the place in Mamet’s works, so the template is there. To be fair, Malkovich is being directed by Mamet himself, so I have to assume that this was intentional. But it suggests a lack of drive or confidence that badly saps the energy from the show.

The set was impressive, but there are two set changes in Act 1 (from office to hotel room and back) involving uncomfortable pauses of around one minute each – a long time when you’re in the audience. Not a smart choice, especially given the fluid staging that has become the norm. The cast was competent, especially Ioanna Kimbook as the actress and Doon Mackichan as the secretary, but they simply lost to the bland material. A waste of an evening.