Instant Depths

Michael Wood

• The Cryptogram by David Mamet
  The Ambassadors Theatre, ISBN 0 00 000097 3
• A Whore’s Profession: Notes and Essays by David Mamet
  Faber, 412 pp, £12.99, June 1994, ISBN 0 571 17076 5

The earlier plays of David Mamet seemed to spring from a meeting between Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter, as if the characters from The Caretaker or The Homecoming had caught the American anxieties of Death of a Salesman. Pinter is also never far from the later plays, and he directed Oleanna in London; but other, more oblique influences now hover in the air. Gregory Mosher, the director of The Cryptogram, thinks Oleanna was ‘Shavian’, and the new play has undercurrents of Chekhov, even Ibsen. At the end, as in The Wild Duck, a child takes off to an attic to die, the victim of the games adults don’t quite know how to play.