SpeedthePlow at the Old Vic
March 22nd, 2008, 10:06 pm Hobbies Ideas
David Mamet%26rsquo;s satire on Tinseltown greed, need and terminal triviality has its
flaws; but it provides two super roles for men able to cope with his brash,
breathless dialogue. And last night Jeff Goldblum, playing the head of
production at a major studio, and Kevin Spacey, the fixer bringing him a
bankable star, didn%26rsquo;t merely rise to the challenge. Nobody with the least
interest in acting should miss the snap and crackle, whizz and fizz of, in
particular, their opening scene.
Goldblum%26rsquo;s Gould sits in the gloriously eccentric office Ron Howell has
designed for the play, a place whose stepladders and sprawled crates
reinforce the feel of Hollywood flux. In crashes Spacey%26rsquo;s Fox in a state of
excitement going on ecstasy. He skips and hops and, at one point, falls to
the floor and does feverish exercises with his fag still in his mouth. And,
boy, does he jabber. After all, he%26rsquo;s secured the services of the great Doug
Brown for the sort of prison movie that%26rsquo;s been made so often it can%26rsquo;t fail.
Imagine a game of ping-pong played with several balls, some filled with
hand-grenades, and you%26rsquo;ve the way Spacey and Goldblum manage a swaggering,
streetwise poetry that overlaps, breaks off, explodes. The speed is
tremendous: less a run than an Olympic sprint over hurdles, with
double-somersaults in between. It%26rsquo;s as expertly acrobatic as the Cirque du
Soleil %26mdash; and funnier than anything their clowns have recently concocted.
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