Review: Boston Marriage ***

Oh I do love Mamet by the seaside

Doesn't really ring right, does it?

But that is what Chris Monks, artistic director of Scarborough's Stephen Joseph Theatre, has brought audiences.

I am a Mamet fan. His writing for theatre and the screen is matchless and his writing about it is, if anything, even more brilliant. So it gives no pleasure to report that the writer is not at his best with Boston Marriage.

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He wrote the play, in part, as a response to the calls of "misogynist" levelled at him after plays like Oleanna and the testosterone-laden Glengarry Glen Ross.

Had he written it as a post-modern ironic take on the comedy of manners of the early 20th century, it would have aged better.

But Mamet appears to be writing without a sense of irony here, it is a rare mis-step.

Which makes me wonder at the curious decision to stage it in Scarborough.

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Monks has said that he wants to make the McCarthy theatre a space for more unusual and experimental theatre, but I could think

of many other shows that would have better filled

that brief.

The play revolves around a Boston Marriage, a phrase coined by Henry James in his book The Bostonians, to describe the arrangement of two women living together.

Anna is home waiting for the return of her lover Claire. Anna has acquired a male protector to provide a lavish lifestyle, and Claire is on her way home to announce she has taken another young woman as a lover.

The action is set in one room, the front room of the home Claire and Anna share, which is groaning under the sheer weight

of chintz.

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It is ably performed, efficiently directed, but there is simply not enough here to grab the attention – save for the brilliant scene-stealing performance from Clare Corbett as the Maid, a Scottish wee girl who regularly bursts into tears.

Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough to June 30.