Branagh's raw power

No modern piece of theatre offers a more fearful moral-health warning than David Mamet's Edmond, his brief immorality play from 1982 about one respectable man's remorseless slither into New York's lower depths.

Here it is again, sounding disturbingly topical in Edward Hall's red-blooded, smoothflowing production, though the Olivier stage is far too vast for a play that mainly consists of two-character close encounters.

As a consolation, however, Kenneth Branagh, returning to the London stage after far too many years away, beautifully fits the title role as if it had been cut and tailored for him.

Mamet takes only 75 shocking minutes and 23 televisual scenes to chart this all-downhill black comedy of a trip to the gutters of humiliation. Cast aside middle-class conventions and inhibitions, abandon marriage and home in an attempt to bring your wildest sexual desires to life, Mamet seems to warn, and you end up living a nightmare, with nowhere left to fall.

The America that Mamet exposes to our fascinated gaze is one where low-life con-artists and crooks, card-sharpers, whores, pimps and peep-show merchants ply their bartering trade. But behind Edmond's polite facade, it transpires, there lurks a racist, murderous sex-seeker who takes a survival knife for protection in the jungle of the city and cannot resist fatally plunging it into innocent flesh.

This may sound like a preachy piece of theatre, accusing America of succumbing to a fierce capitalism and leaving the country's varieties of underdog in snarling alienation. But Mamet insists Edmond's life was preordained and fated.

I think he has written a classic play about the dark dangerous impulses that exist in us all and need to be kept under strict control. Branagh's Edmond begins as the picture of middleclass conventionality. In his dark two-piece suit, he sits in his New York living room and calmly tells his wife, (a furious Tracy-Ann Oberman) he has not loved her for years and is leaving for ever.

Then in a helter-skelter of scenes, played on designer Michael Pavelka's bareish, unatmospheric stage which fails to capture Mamet's sense of New York in crumbling disarray, Edmond steps out into anarchy's playground. Branagh deftly catches all the right changes in the man's temper, tone and style.

His politeness passes, anger flares. Stripped naked and right down to his incipient middleaged spread in the company of Rebecca Johnson's shrewd whore, Branagh's Edmond is comically torn between driving a hard bargain and getting laid. Bloodied and dollarless, he seethes with a fine outrage and after inflicting retaliatory violence upon a passing pimp, his acting turns remarkable. He stands there, tongue out, breathing all deep and heavy, uttering odd wordless cries And when it comes to murder he suddenly erupts as if a match had been tossed into dry tinder.

Edmond is not a major Mamet.The anti-hero's decline and fall is too briskly allegorical and the characters are a touch cartoonish. Besides the prison cell finale, in which a serene Edmond insists he cannot control his life and plants a goodnight kiss upon a prisoner who earlier forcibly buggered him, smacks of soothing sentimentality. Yet what a riveting nightmare vision of America is unfurled before us. And with what intense imposing vigour Branagh strips himself down to his bare essentials and reveals a soul in torment.

Edmond