Mamet's Buffalo shows its age

There can be no more suitable time to knock a play than when it's up. David Mamet's American Buffalo, in which three small-time crooks plot a thieving mission that's quite beyond their powers, sold out its short London season before the first-night. But Neil Pepe's production, imported from New York's Atlantic Theatre, makes me wonder how I once so admired this 23-year-old piece. For this play to have arrived just after the sensational London debut of Bash, by young American writer Neil LaBute, is a triumph of bad-timing. In comparison with Bash, American Buffalo bears the softness and flabby sprawl of middle-age about it. Oh, David, where is your sting?

Of course, in American Buffalo Mamet famously dirtied-down the English language. He returned low-life talk from the sleazier streets of life to the stage. His less than blue-collar characters, thieves on respectability's verge, were blue of speech. Their chatter was a rank, rich fizz of vulgarities and expletives. We middle-class theatre critics were thrilled to be introduced to the criminal classes - at several safe removes. We savoured the lingua franca of Buffalo's more daring thrusts. "I put my dick on the chopping block," rages William H. Macy as Teach , the ingratiating, betrayed crook who can find no thieving work. But nowadays no one turns a hair at "dicks" or much else besides. Last night, a moustachioed, brilliantined Macy, and cursing to the crude manner born, raised some laughs.

Mamet has a fine ear but has he a mind to match? For American Buffalo has something serious to say. The setting, a junkshop for which designer Kevin Rigdon has inventively stuffed the stage from top to bottom with hideous paraphernalia, is a place where serious business deals are made. The deals are about thieving, a hopeful liberation of a valuable coin collection from a nearby apartment.

In an America where everyone hustles to make it, even crooks have to be competitive and to work hard to be winners. This fact of criminal life gives the play its slightly sentimental, comic edge and significance. Loyalty, criminal morality, betrayal and honour among thieves are all involved, though not that dramatically: the play wavers, wanders and detours too long before the action-line emerges. Teach's attempts to organise the robbery, after he has persuaded the shop-owner to dispense with the young assistant's services, nicely betray his own ineptitude. Dissolution follows on.

Macy's aggrieved, self-important Teach is angry and his speedy manners energise Neil Pepe's far too placid production. He is pleasingly ridiculous too as he hustles, snarls and flatters his way into the shop-owner's confidence. It's a limited performance, though. Macy quite misses the sense of desperation and fury that ought to fire role and production alike. Meanwhile Philip Baker Hall's Don, the kindly though crooked shop-owner and Mark Webber, in a smooth and confident stage debut, as the devious shop assistant valiantly inject their energy into Mamet's wilted parable about a country where everyone sells themselves for something.

American Buffalo