But anyone who turned up expecting Ms Lohan, making her stage debut at the age of 28, to exhibit spoilt-child celeb behaviour – fluffing lines, or breaking parole, or racing off to rehab, or simply not turning up – was in for a disappointment. She was rather sweet, rather husky, rather wide-eyed – and rather good. She was, in fact, possibly the best thing about this show.
David Mamet’s three-hander, set against the world of Hollywood producers, also starred Richard Schiff and Nigel Lindsay. Schiff, a wonderful stage actor best known for his Emmy-winning portrayal of Toby Ziegler in The West Wing, disappointed, which is a terrible and surprising admission for someone who adored that show. Nigel Lindsay, the fine comic British actor, made a decent American fist of his co-producer, all hot breath and physicality and simmering threats and slavering at the sudden possibility of shedloads (this being Mamet, that precise term wasn’t employed) of wealth.
But Mamet’s scripts famously call for perfectly honed pauses – and, more importantly, for characters to talk over and through each other, ever repeating or adorning phrases, until nothing is left but the crack of tension. They call for the Swiss-watch counterpointing to be tungsten-perfect, and, at least in the first 20 minutes of this show, until Lohan first joined the two on stage, it wasn’t. Perhaps the two male leads were simply nervous, having reportedly undergone many rehearsals where Lohan’s script-memory wasn’t up to snuff, and that will surely be resolved in subsequent productions. But they needn’t have been, at all.
Lohan plays the ingenue temp who, patronisingly assigned by Schiff (he’s hoping for fringe benefits) the task of a “courtesy reading” of a by all accounts execrable end-of-the-world book, free of syntax and sense, somehow discerns in it a universal truth. And persuades Schiff to make the film adaptation and change his mind overnight, thus persuading him to welch on his deal with Nigel Lindsay’s character for a sure-fire bankable buddy movie. In the last 15 minutes, the fireworks finally kick off, the three squaring up, the script finally flowing, the pauses and eruptions pitch-perfect, but the audience has been, by then, underwhelmed.
Whether a spiky satire on Hollywood – full of Mamet lines such as “audiences just want to see the same film they saw last year” – was best mirrored in a not uncynical ploy by director Lindsay Posner to cast a “troubled” darling of the yellow press in the female lead to get bums on seats is for others to debate. But Lohan was, if not tremendous, a minor revelation. At the curtain call there was genuine glee on her face as she hugged and giggled with her co-stars: she’d bloody done it. This can only get better, as the three settle and ease, but it’s going to be hard to hit the Old Vic heights of a few years ago (mentioned to me by several audience members) attained by Jeff Goldblum and Kevin Spacey.
