It is an actor's prerogative to be a perfectly well-adjusted human being 95% of the time and utterly unbearable for the last 15 minutes or so before going on stage. David Mamet has spent more time than most massaging actors' egos and soothing their foibles, before slipping them some of the most barbed, self-lacerating lines of any modern American dramatist.
It's hard to tell whether Mamet's backstage banter constitutes a love song or poison-pen letter to his profession: he celebrates the theatre as an arena of honest toil and legitimate dreams, and despises it as a cauldron of absurd pretence and shallow self-deception. What he really relishes, however, is the way the theatrical world operates at one remove from normality. It remains one of the few enclaves in modern society where men can engage in earnest discussion about the superiority of sable over camel for a make-up brush.
First produced in 1977, A Life in the Theatre is more composite than play, an agglomeration of deadly sharp character sketches that Mamet accumulated over the years. The 15 or so scenelets trace the opposing trajectories of an old stager and a young stag, as their careers briefly converge for a season of hoary old standards in some hokey unnamed rep.
The ambitious young John is fresh, talented and wet behind the ears, while sour old Robert has the traces of old make-up encrusted behind his. At first we see the junior actor in thrall to his mentor, impressed by daft, actorly dictums such as: "We must not be afraid of process." Gradually, however, the balance of power shifts as John sets course for bigger and brighter things and Robert shuffles sadly towards the door.
Laurence Penry-Jones gives an impressively guileless performance as the fresh-faced rookie, fielding phone calls from his agent and the outside world, and Peter Cartwright is deliciously vinegary as the lonely old ham retreating into a life of theatrical monasticism. Director Hannah Chissick strikes a fine balance between these two men who love their profession and ultimately come to loathe each other.
· Until January 19. Box office: 01332 363275.
