Review: Glengarry Glen Ross, Old Vic ★★★

Always be closing: Mamet’s no-holds-barred capitalism gets an all-female makeover at the Old Vic

Fast-paced, cut-throat, thrust and fight from the opening lines: watching Glengarry Glen Ross in the round at the Old Vic feels like being ringside at a sparring match. The desperation and dread is palpable. Real pressure and intensity radiate from the stage, and the profanity fits the environment without feeling gratuitous: just as we know people swear in restaurant kitchens, we assume this is simply how these people speak.

The business at the centre of the play operates like one big gamble: all the excitement of the races or a sports bet, big rewards and terrible losses. Chasing leads and seeking closes, the lower-performing agents get the worse deals and so are permanently stuck in the underperforming niche. It is not unlike youngsters trying to get a job now: no job without experience, no experience without a job.

David Mamet wrote the play in 1983, capturing an exact window of time and space: Reaganomics and all its greed, no-holds-barred capitalism, trampling over anyone to get to the top. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1984 and has barely left the stage since. Patrick Marber, who saw the original National Theatre production as a teenager and has since directed it on Broadway, brings it here with one significant change: an all-female cast, led by Rosa Salazar and Indira Varma.

The look at toxic masculinity is laid even more plain when played by women. The slight caricature portrayal of the environment highlights the way men were expected to behave within it: selling themselves, selling their bravado, selling land, competing. It is all a big game, and the female casting underlines exactly that. Rob Howell‘s set moves cleanly between the Chinese restaurant of the opening scene and the office that follows, while his costumes, female versions of the male power suits of the era, channel the period effectively.

Nancy Crane was the emotional heart of the piece: her parental anxiety to provide, the fear that if the next deal doesn’t close she cannot meet the needs of a child at home, is written in every line of her face. It is the moment the play stops being about salesmen and starts being about people. Indira Varma, whose presence usually commands a room, felt somewhat wasted: the role simply does not give her enough. Niky Wardley and Rosa Salazar, along with the rest of the cast, delivered Mamet’s speedy repartee with confidence.

For me, it was a shame that the production did not take the female casting further. The actors use male pronouns, male names, American accents throughout, which keeps them at a slight distance from the story and so are we. I wonder whether something more searching might have emerged from a production that allowed the casting to really interrogate the text rather than simply inhabit it unchanged.

And then there is the language. Some of it has aged distressingly, and I have to be honest about that. The racial slurs applied to customers sat very uneasily with me and a Chinese restaurant referred to as a “chinky” does not aid our understanding of the greed or desperation of these characters. It jars uncomfortably. I understand that Mamet controls his text and does not often permit changes. Audiences might find this language be necessary in a play explicitly exploring racism and the attitudes of that time. But this is not that play, and we surely do not need to hear it.

None of which makes this a bad evening. The performances are committed, the production is clean, and Mamet’s diagnosis of a particular kind of capitalist desperation remains sharp forty years on. But I left feeling that this production had not quite decided what it wanted to say.

Glengarry Glen Ross runs at the Old Vic, The Cut, London SE1 8NB until 18 July 2026. Running time approximately 1 hour 25 minutes, no interval. Tickets from £14.50. Age guidance 16+.