Oleanna – Dir. Nick Brown – Pumphouse Theatre: March 13, 2025 (Theatre Review)
OLEANNA at the Pumphouse Theatre throws us straight into a cauldron of miscommunication and abuse of power, the two actors delivering David Mamet’s hothouse of a play with nerve and aplomb.
The play (whose title comes from a 19th-century folk song about a vision of utopia) is deceptively not straightforward. But—from Glengarry Glen Ross to The Spanish Prisoner—what of Mamet’s ever is?
Many years ago, Ayn Rand as playwright gave us the device of a jury on stage, its members coming from the audience, whose verdict was delivered (she hoped) based on each juror’s sense of life.
Something similar is intended here. Except the audience finds themselves moved based on their subjective experience. Animated conversations in the theatre afterwards tells me that Mamet, and this production, succeeded. Yet if you take the play’s tagline seriously, “whichever side you take, you’re wrong.”
The set is spare: 3 chairs, a desk, a (casting) couch. Two people in a simple university room, he a professor, she a failing student. She with much to learn; he with too little to teach. What she does learn is a lesson about power that will destroy them both.
Mamet’s dialogue, with its frequent interjections, is difficult to play well and just as spare as always. The play’s three acts can almost be told in its constant refrain: “I don’t understand.” “Do you see???” “You don’t understand.”
Stephen Butterworth’s professor is forever in motion, restless, whether preaching to his unreceptive student audience, or trying to extricate himself from the black hole that is about to engulf him.
You can watch him disintegrate in front of your eyes. From a self-assured—and pompous, patronising and pontificating—professor, proud of his own glibness, fatuous in his disrespect for the niceties, oozing with oleaginous zeal, with all the self-assuredness of one just before a fall.
And her, the student, from a chrysalis of timid uncertainty, unsure of her place in academia or in the world —but there to learn—emerges to strut on the stage her post-modern professor has made for her.
From uncertain to dictatorial, Amy Cotter plays her brilliantly. Never wholly unsympathetic, listening only to “my group,” maturing into a power she now discovers she wields. (And don’t call her “baby.”)
It’s that flipping of power that is almost breathtaking. He spends Act One not listening; she not understanding. By Act 3 she is refusing to listen, he not understanding.
We do feel our post-modern professor is hung on a gallows of his own making, and the execution happens before we can even catch our breath. ‘Cos when there is no truth, as he teaches, when all is subjective, then it’s all about the power structures, baby.
Neither character is likeable. Yet each actor makes them sympathetic. Hard to do.
The play first premiered in 1992, beautifully reflected in the music chosen for the scene changes: Manic Street Preachers’ Small Black Flowers That Grow in the Sky. The song doesn’t just bring us back to when the play’s theme was super-topical—it also (in referencing Goethe’s mode of experiment) takes us straight to the subjectivism at the heart of the play.
Because neither sees, nor wants to see, “the other.” Yet each manipulates the other to maintain proximity. And in that compression the inevitable eruption is made to happen.
If I may carp, I do wonder at the fashion of actors using North American accents. Yes, I know, they can all do them well —and I celebrate with them every time they get a good American TV payday. But stories like this can happen anywhere. They happen here. And they are much more powerful if told ‘in our own tongue.’
With that aside, this is powerful theatre done well. Get along—but get along quickly. It only has a limited run.
**Theatre Peter**
OLEANNA is on at the Pumphouse Theatre until the 15th of March
Tickets HERE.
