Glengarry Glen Ross

Olympia Theatre, Dublin until Sunday, 6 October. Dublin Theatre Festival.

First of all, if you've seen the film of 'Glengarry Glen Ross', then don't go to see this. Secondly, if you haven't seen the film, then still don't go to see this. Ok, perhaps that's a bit harsh, but what many were thinking would be the highlight of the 45th Dublin Theatre Festival, has turned out to be a huge disappointment in almost every respect.

It wasn't supposed to be thus. This is, after all, David Mamet's 1984 Pulitzer Prize winner brought to the Dublin stage by the renowned Chicago-based Steppenwolf Theatre Company. A Chicago play brought to us by Chicago's finest. Surely we'd be talking about it for years? No. Less than 24 hours have passed and already the production has vanished in the mists of mediocrity.

The problem is evident from the start. The curtain is barely off the floor before Mike Nussbaum, playing ageing under-fire salesman Shelly Levene, launches into his lines like he's worried about missing the last bus home. But given what follows, it's hardly Nussbaum's fault. All of the actors seem to be under threat of the knife if they don't get through the dialogue in record time. It all boils down to a first act which fails to set any context, and seems to whirr by in about ten minutes. Well, almost.

All in all, it is this disastrous first act which rips the heart out of the production. This is supposed to be the act where we learn of the harsh reality of life as a Chicago real estate salesman in the early 1980s. Apart from the aforementioned Levene, who has resorted to bribing office manager Williamson for the good sales 'leads', the sales force is completed by Dave Moss, George Aaronow and Ricky Roma. Moss and Aranow are in the same boat as Levene - washed up, struggling to make a sale, their best days long behind them. Roma, on the other hand, is the office star - slick and slippy, top of the sales board, the living embodiment of the sales maxim 'always be closing'. Yep, we were SUPPOSED to learn this from the first act, but the pacing is so poor that one shudders to think how Mamet would react to it all.

Granted, things improve in the second act, but it's all simply too little too late. One of the other main problems with the whole piece is how it's played so obviously for laughs. Admittedly, some of Mamet's incendiary dialogue IS funny, but only in the most darkly savage way. Here, it's played in a cutesy, you-can-laugh-now manner. It didn't help that the audience lapped it up.

Perhaps the best thing about the production is the set in the second act. Expertly capturing the atmosphere of a run-down, suffocating sales office, it almost manages to take on a dual personality of its own - your best friend when you've just returned from sealing a deal, your worst enemy as you're stuck worrying about when you'll emerge from your bad 'streak'.

On the acting front, it would be cruel to compare the performers here with Al Pacino, Kevin Spacey, Jack Lemmon, Ed Harris, Alan Arkin and Jonathan Pryce, who were uniformly magnificent in the 1992 film adaptation. But this is the Steppenwolf company, after all, so aren't we within our rights to expect at least one performance of brilliance? Don't hold your breath.

'Glengarry Glen Ross' remains one of the finest American plays of the past thirty years. Unfortunately for all Dublin theatregoers, Steppenwolf has failed to cover itself in glory with this production. A peerless play rendered pallid and prosaic.

Tom Grealis