Review: Oleanna ****

David Mamet is a playwright who demands a lot from his audience. In Oleanna he not only confines the action to a claustrophobic university lecturer's office, but crams into it an encyclopaedia's worth of ideas.

Here Kevin McGowan is John, the don, banking on promotion who speaks a lot, but says very little and Claire Louise Cordwell is his student nemesis Carol, who shatters the status quo when she accuses him of sexual harrasment.

In Mamet's world we never know who is telling the truth as he exposes the gap between what people mean and what others hear.

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The two characters speak over each other, sentences are often never finished and from the start a feeling it's all going to end badly hangs in the air.

It is intense stuff, but McGowan and Cordwell deliver two powerful performances, more than equal to Mamet's words and the small Studio theatre provides the perfect backdrop to the action.

If there's a criticism, it's that neither character inspires any particular sympathy. John is oily, charmless and blinkered by too many years in his ivory tower and Carol, who turns from vulnerable student to chief witch-hunter is similarly alientating. By the disturbing final scenes, you kind of think they deserve each other.

York Theatre Royal

To November 27. 01904 623568.

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