A recent all-female production of Glengarry Glen Ross at London’s Old Vic gave audiences the chance to revisit one of the defining plays of modern American theatre. It also raised the question of whether a work so deeply associated with male aggression and competition looks different when performed by women.
Written by David Mamet and first staged in 1983, Glengarry Glen Ross remains one of the most influential dramas of the past half-century. It won the Pulitzer Prize, inspired a celebrated film adaptation, and helped establish Mamet as one of America’s most distinctive playwrights.
I have spent years researching David Mamet as part of an upcoming biography. He’s a writer often described as both the “poet laureate” and the “zoologist” of American macho culture. Throughout his career he has returned repeatedly to men at work: salesmen, con artists, soldiers, businessmen and hustlers. His plays explore competition, status, power and the rituals through which men establish dominance over one another.
No work embodies those concerns more completely than Glengarry Glen Ross. Once described as “Death of a Fuckin’ Salesman”, the play openly acknowledges its debt to Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman while updating it for the harsher economic climate of late-20th-century America. Where Miller’s tragedy is steeped in disappointment and regret, Mamet’s world is driven by desperation, cynicism and survival.
The play follows a group of struggling Chicago real-estate salesmen whose livelihoods depend on securing valuable sales leads. As pressure mounts, they lie to clients and manipulate one another. Eventually they become entangled in an office burglary centred on the coveted “Glengarry leads”. These are lists of promising customers that can determine who succeeds and who fails.
When it first appeared, the play shocked audiences. Its language was littered with profanity, insults and verbal aggression. Mamet’s distinctive rhythms – clipped, fragmented and meticulously crafted – became so influential that critics eventually coined the term “Mametian” for them.
But the power of Glengarry Glen Ross extends beyond its language. The play offers a devastating portrait of a workplace built on humiliation, insecurity and relentless competition.
The salesmen constantly invoke friendship, loyalty and family values when speaking to potential customers. Yet these appeals are merely tools of persuasion. Behind the performance lies a culture of mistrust in which colleagues deceive one another as readily as they deceive their clients.
The unseen owners of the company, Mitch and Murray, never appear on stage, but their presence dominates the action. They distribute the best sales opportunities to the highest performers and leave everyone else to struggle with increasingly hopeless prospects. Success breeds success, and failure becomes almost impossible to escape.
In this respect, Mamet’s play remains a powerful critique of American capitalism. It exposes a system that rewards ruthlessness while encouraging workers to view one another as rivals rather than allies.
The character of Shelly “The Machine” Levene echoes Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman. Mamet himself once remarked that the two men were essentially the same character, except that Glengarry Glen Ross shows him in the workplace rather than at home. Both are ageing salesmen confronting the possibility that the economic system they devoted their lives to has no further use for them.
The play also captured the anxiety that defined the Reagan era: aggressive individualism, consumer culture and changing ideas about masculinity. It portrays not only economic failure but the spiritual cost of measuring human worth solely through success.
Women and machismo
That makes the decision to stage the play with an all-female cast particularly intriguing.
Mamet has often been criticised for the marginal role women occupy in his work. Female characters are frequently absent altogether or remain peripheral to the action. As one critic observed: “talking about Mr. Mamet’s women is a bit like talking about Renoir’s men. They have always been a secondary part of the vision, painted less vigorously and positioned less conspicuously on the canvas”.
So, why has he allowed an all-female version, especially when there are no female roles in the play? I find it hard to accept that it’s a sop to his critics who accuse him of misogyny, as Mamet and director Patrick Marber refused to change any names or pronouns. The characters still refer to their “balls”. Roma’s notorious tirades still contain the same homophobic slurs. The language remains untouched.
As a result, the production does something more interesting than simply updating the play. Rather than transforming the characters into women, it asks what happens when women perform roles originally conceived as expressions of male identity. The answer is not straightforward, however.
At times the production highlights how deeply the play is rooted in the culture of the 1980s. The characters rely on landline telephones, while sales figures are written on blackboards. The office feels like a world preserved in amber.
The play also feels surprisingly contemporary. Precarious employment, impossible targets and workplace surveillance have hardly disappeared. If anything, they have become more familiar.
When Roma declares, “We are members of a dying breed”, it’s a line which still resonates. The travelling salesman may have faded into history but the pressures that define these characters’ lives have not.
Today’s workers – whether male or female – are simply more likely to encounter them in call centres, delivery networks or gig-economy platforms than in a Chicago real-estate office.