03.01.08
Speed-the-Plow with Kevin Spacey and Jeff Goldblum
On Wednesday evening I met up with Dominique to go to see Speed-the-Plow at the Old Vic. Dom and I often see plays there together and we like to eat at the Hope & Anchor pub down the road afterwards. The Hope & Anchor is considered a “gastropub” and the food is certainly a cut above the average pub food, yet quite inexpensive too.
Speed-the-Plow is a David Mamet play about movie executives in Los Angeles. Mamet also wrote Glengarry Glen Ross about real estate agents and failure, which won the Pulitzer Prize and was turned into a movie starring Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Alec Baldwin and Kevin Spacey. Speed-the-Plow as a stageplay had a cast of just three, played by Spacey, Jeff Goldblum and Laura Michelle Kelly. It was similarly tight on running time – just one and half hours with no interval.
I don’t want to give too much plot detail away but the three acts are quite distinct, from the frenetic showmanship of act 1, to the pseudo-mysticism of act 2, and then, finally, act 3 where we actually get down to the nub of who the characters are and what makes them tick. It was hard to know what people’s true desires were at the beginning of the play but they are quite exposed by the end.
It was a fun play with lots of witty one-liners (“I believe in the Yellow Pages but I don’t want to make a movie about it”). There were also striking images, particularly with the height difference between Goldblum and Spacey (Goldblum’s lanky legs accentuated by his high-waisted trousers). However, I must say that act 3 was the best because it was the first time when I truly understood the stakes and what I was watching.
