Jason Pitt brings moments of danger to the only other
role, a man who in the origi- nal I seem to have recalled as a male nurse rather than just another inmate, but the lesson of this revival is that the play does not have the great internal strength of the other Gielgud-Richardson double-header, Pinter's No Man's Land, which perhaps explains why it has been rather less in revival. Defenders of Home tend to talk of it as a concerto for voices, or as a kind of tone poem of decline and defeat and dis- tance. What it lacks is any kind of real drama or development, though in another long-life partnership Eddington and Briers do prove once again that the team is greater than its separate members.
David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross (Donmar Warehouse), back in London for the first time since its National premiere a decade ago, and again with an all-English cast, holds up rather better than much Of his other work. A scattershot, scatological transatlantic treat about the selling by
like two rocks of Gibraltar topped by Cruise missiles ready to blow the roof off. Miss Basinger is a blow-up doll come to life: leggy legs, stick-on breasts, pumped-up lips — like a custom-built woman who's been ordered a la carte. My vague memory of Ali McGraw in the 1972 original is that she was pretty but real. Casting further back, I find it impossible to think of earlier gangsters' molls — Ida Lupino, say — in terms of breasts.
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