Bitter Wheat

by David Mamet

seen at the Garrick Theatre on 17 June 2019

David Mamet directs his own new play with John Malkovich as Barney Fein, a powerful and lecherous Hollywood producer, Doon Mackichan as his PA Sondra, Ioanna Kimbook as a young actress Yung Kim Li, Alexander Arnold as Roberto the intern, Teddy Kempner as Dr Wald, Matthew Pidgeon as a writer and Zephryn Taitte as Charles Arthur Brown.

The play concerns the hubris and downfall of Barney Fein, presented as a narcissistic monster with a peculiarly short attention span. The opening scene in which he dismisses a writer, establishes the typical exercise of power wielded by someone for whom power is a necessity, not a means of helping anyone else. Further instances abound - delegating the task of buying a birthday present, ignoring or insulting employees, expecting a doctor to provide shady medicine for spurious reasons, demanding that a massuese visit him on her wedding day. It could be blackly comic, but blackness, ar rather, sheer unpleasantness, predominates in the when Barney attempts to extract increasingly bizarre sexual favours from an aspiring actress of Korean origin. (Naturally, he is blithely inattentive about the fact that she grew up in Kent, or that the Korean language is entirely different from Chinese. The title of the play derives from his belief that a film he might distribute could be renamed since the original title might mean something different due to tonal inflections.)

In the second half, after the actress has raised an alarm and apparently ruined his career, his fantasising reaches new levels; Barney seems determined to recast any experience he has in the lurid terms of a film 'treatment' rather than face what is really happening. Thus he melodramatically assumes he is saving the young woman from possible assassination when a man with a gun is admitted to his office, because he assumes that this is the person who has shot his mother.

The treatment of the main character is presumably meant to be satiric, but in the event his deep unpleasantness is impossible to make light of, and his complete inability to remember anything significant is neither convincingly malicious nor convincingly demented. This leaves John Malkovich with an unenviable task in carrying the play - the other characters are mere satellites or ciphers - and his style of delivery renders Barney tediously loquacious rather than truly threatening. Indeed the opening scenes of the play lacked any sort of energy; the incompetent and ignored intern, for example, seemed to be the product of poor writing rather than being a proper character. The two female characters were the most interesting, but the play, dealing with the long delayed public acknowledgement of the sexual exploitation of women in the film industry, remains fixated on the neuroses of the man responsible.

All very well - but it is not a brilliant play, especially by David Mamet's standards.