Oh, come on. You didn’t think a David Mamet play about the Me Too movement with a thinly-disguised Harvey Weinstein figure as the central character was actually going to be good, did you?
Please.
YES, Bitter Wheat is a thoroughly, utterly, completely dreadful play. Once upon a time, David Mamet might have been capable of writing a pungent, sharply funny satire about horrible Hollywood people doing horrible things and then trying to evade the consequences of their horrible behaviour. That time, on the evidence of the fiasco currently lumbering through a summer run at the Garrick, is long past. The plot is predictable enough – Barney Fein, producer and all-round sleazeball, invites/entices jet-lagged young Anglo-Korean film-maker Yung Kim Li into his apartment and attempts to Do Nasty Things To Which She Doesn’t Consent, she sets off the fire alarm, and the scandal finishes his career – after which, God help us, wacky hijinks, or what Mr. Mamet believes are wacky hijinks, ensue in the final scene. Mamet seems to be somehow under the impression that he’s written a comedy. To say he hasn’t is a breathtaking understatement.
It’s not the scenario, actually, that’s at fault here. It would be as good a starting-off point as any for a satire about the repulsive behaviour of a powerful Hollywood shitbag-in-a-suit. Mamet, unfortunately, doesn’t appear to be attempting anything as evolved as satire here. Bitter Wheat, it turns out, is less a play and more just an over-the-hill reactionary prick ejaculating sexist/racist/unpleasantly right-wing comments over the stage for 85 minutes, interspersed with feeder lines from a cast of (very good) supporting actors who all have too little to do. That might be OK, or at least not completely excruciating to sit through, if Barney Fein’s verbal diarrhoea was funny; there are two or three reasonably big laughs in the first half of the play, but it mostly isn’t.
And that, in turn, might not matter so much if the production’s above-the-title star seemed to be in any way awake. John Malkovich – an astonishingly potent stage actor when he wants to be, as anyone who saw him in Burn This (also far from a first-rate play) years ago will tell you – is phoning it in here. And by ‘phoning it in’, I mean he seems to be faxing his performance over a dodgy connection from a small town somewhere in Uzbekistan. It can’t be easy to take a starring role and then have to get up eight times a week in front of a less-than-completely-enthusiastic audience, wearing a laughably bad fat suit, to deliver an incoherent string of witless lines in a slack mess of a play sloppily directed by its entirely too self-regarding author, but when hundreds of people per performance have paid mostly to see him it would be nice if he could give the impression that he is actually in the building when he’s onstage. Apparently that’s too much trouble.
The supporting actors, while they don’t have enough to do, all emerge with their dignity intact. Matthew Pidgeon is lucky – he has nothing to do between the first scene and the curtain call, which means he’s spared having to navigate the (considerable) worst of his brother-in-law’s writing – and Teddy Kempner, whose epic beard is worth at least a couple of bonus points, does as much as he can as Fein’s slightly dubious doctor, a role Mamet possibly wrote while unconscious. Doon Mackichan, as Fein’s PA Sondra, makes by far the strongest impression, and she’s the most interesting person onstage – a woman working for a man she knows is a serial sex abuser, who disapproves of his behaviour but has made a great deal of money because of him, who has never been on the receiving end of that side of him herself, and who isn’t inclined to rat him out to the FBI when the shit hits the fan. Somewhere within those contradictions there’s a much better play, and a much more insightful look at how people like Harvey Weinstein managed to get away for so long with behaviour everybody knew about. The key, probably, would be to keep the Weinstein character offstage for as long as possible, rather than wallowing in his repulsive behaviour for 85 minutes of stage time. Twenty-five years ago, that’s a play Mamet could possibly have written. Twenty-five years is a long time… as you’ll learn in the twenty-five-minute second act of Bitter Wheat, which feels like it.
Saving the word, one apostrophe at a time. 