Ok. I may take a while to recover from this one.
David Mamet’s 1992 two-hander Oleanna is the latest play from Boulevard Productions, and it doesn’t just challenge preconceived notions about inappropriate behaviour: it attaches grenades to those notions, ties them to a railway track, and drives an express train over them. Harold Pinter, who directed the first UK production, said of it, ‘There can be no tougher or more unflinching play’. Harold, that’s a bit of an understatement.
This production has no right to be as good as it is. It’s First Week for goodness’ sake. There are no good plays in First Week - isn’t that one of the original decrees of Lord Ouds of Gloucester Green? And it’s in the never-used theatrical space of New College’s Long Room, a venue so unpopular with thespians that the last time I saw something there was 1984. But as it turns out, the Long Room is just as intense and atmospheric as the Burton Taylor. Maybe it just fell out of favour because it’s so hard to locate, somewhere deep within the bowels of New College. (On leaving, it took me fifteen minutes just to find my way back to the Porters’ Lodge, by which time I was sweating with panic, while well-brought-up students kept passing me in the corridors saying, ‘Good evening’.)
Anyway.
Oleanna depicts the disastrous, destructive relationship between university lecturer John (Alec Greene) and student Carol (Laura Boyd). It’s the last of the great Dirty Tutor Trifecta that began with Pinter’s own Accident in 1967, and continued with Willy Russell’s Educating Rita in 1980. Accident depicted sexually abusive dons as normal, middle-aged men in need of an outlet from their ex-nubile wives, and Rita saw only a heart-warming love story in the girl from a working-class background who melts the cockles of a disillusioned old academic fart. They were both very much products of their times.
Oleanna is ahead of the curve. Mamet may have written it in 1992, but it was fifteen years before the Me Too movement really made the world sit up and take notice. What’s even more remarkable is that Mamet is normally such a male playwright. He is the chronicler of American toxic masculinity. And yet, in Oleanna, he finds a balance that keeps the audience’s sympathies teetering like a trainee tightrope-walker. At one moment John seems a caring, concerned teacher; at the next he’s crossing the line into inappropriate hands on shoulders, and later far worse. Is he driven inexorably to violence by Carol’s unfair accusations? Or do Carol’s accusations function as a revealing, ultraviolet light on the invisible ink of his true character? The answer to that question keeps shifting throughout the play, and it depends as much on the individual perspectives of the onlookers as on the intentions of the playwright, the director or the actors. The tension between the explosive, career-ending nature of the accusation on the one hand, and the accused gradually coming to see the error of his ways on the other, leaves us in a vacuum of doubt and tension.
Mamet’s script leaves it up to the individual production to decide how much physical contact and violence to employ, so a skilled director can control and confound the audience’s sensibilities according to their own vision. Here, Charlie Lewis shows absolute mastery of theatrical timing to create a pressure cooker of a chamber piece. And in Alec Greene and Laura Boyd he has two actors who mesmerise from the first moment. Every pause, every unfinished sentence, every blurted statement, is loaded with hidden flaws and dark motivations. So convincing was their joint performance that, by the end, I found myself wishing they would hug each other just to prove it was all acting.
The script itself is a masterpiece of unfinished declarations. He’s constantly on the phone, half-sentences being cut off by an unheard collocutor. She is too nervous to complete a statement. They constantly talk over each other, apologising, forcing, backtracking. It makes for a twitchy, nerve-shredding experience, reminiscent of William H Macy in the Coen Brothers’ Fargo. (In fact it was Macy who played the tutor in Mamet’s own film adaptation of Oleanna.)
When, in the final scene, John and Carol do finally manage to complete an answer to each other, the relief is cathartically intense. The mere act of unfiltered communication is as precious as air to breathe. And when it all culminates in full-on, graphic brutality, with kicking, punching and chair-smashing, it oddly feels as though they finally understand each other. Mamet is focusing on the fragility of status. But his real target is the obfuscation and social division driven by words. Words are power, and in Oleanna, the question is, whose word has greater weight.
It all ends in unspoken violence. There are no winners. Without words, we are all equal, like cave men, pulling hair and yelling in rage. We may be monsters, but at least, without the sophistication of words, we’re honest. Him. Her. You. And Me Too.