Writer: David Mamet
Director: Russell Bolam
There’s no denying that David Mamet is an old-fashioned writer, perhaps a member of theatre’s equivalent to literature’s Great Male Narcissists, the name that David Foster Wallace gave to American writers such as Updike, Roth and Mailer. Mamet’s last play Bitter Wheat, a thinly disguised story about Harvey Weinstein, bombed and so it’s a brave choice from the Southwark Playhouse to revive one of his plays from 1977.
A brave but misguided choice as The Woods is an unsatisfying battle of the sexes and it’s not hard to see why it hasn’t been performed in the UK in the last 25 years. It begins with the sound of plimsolls squeaking on a gym floor. It comes as a surprise that this is meant to be the sound of seagulls.
Nicky has invited his girlfriend Ruth to his family’s cabin in the woods so that they can get out of the city for a few days. They have the cabin to themselves, but quite quickly they tire of each other. She annoys him with her armchair biology – ‘ appetites are the body’s way of telling us what it needs’ – while he worries and fusses about the cold and the rain like a man three times his age.
They barely manage the first night without arguing. She recounts half-remembered stories her oversexed grandmother told her; he tells her about the neighbour who believes that he was probed by Martians. It’s not until the second act that the play takes a darker and more typical Mamet turn, but in 2022 there’s nothing ambiguous about sexual assault.
It’s hard to know whether we’re meant to have any empathy for Nicky’s behaviour and pent-up rage, especially as we know so little about him. He sees her as a witch, and she’s damned if she drowns and damned if she doesn’t. Other myths and histories float to the surface like the idea that Viking women smashed the skulls of new-born girl babies giving the impression that the female species is some kind of violent earth mother. This is perhaps reflected in the way that Ruth wants to explore the woods while Nicky wants to stay in and worry about how the bears may come roaming. One with a huge erection disturbs his dreams.
Sam Frenchum, so good in Camus’ The Outsider at The Coronet a few years ago, is not a likeable Nicky; necrotic and demanding, always telling Ruth to ‘Come here’ or to give him a kiss. He also says to her, without irony, ‘ I can see your body anytime I want to.’ He seems a long way from the programme notes that describe him as a ‘mythical hero’.
Francesca Carpanini, in her UK debut, has a better time of it, particularly in the third act when she awakes to a new day with a more resilient persona. Carpanini deals well with Mamet’s rather out-dated notions about sex and is able to give her character some layers of complexities that Frenchum’s Nicky lacks.
Running at only 80 minutes we don’t spend too long in these woods, or go very deep into them. That men and women are essentially different is a very 1970s’ concern. This show is for Mamet completists only.
Runs until 26 March 2022
