The Woods

Theatre | Southwark Playhouse  | ★★★✩✩

You wonder: would this early David Mamet from 1977 have been revived had not it been for the great works that followed: Speed the Plow, Oleanna, Glengarry Glen Ross? Or the better-known plays that came before: Sexual Perversity In Chicago, American Buffalo? Probably not. 

But if you love the verbal pugilistic combat of a Mamet play, you will nevertheless find something to like about this two-hander directed by Russell Bolam. 

Nick (Sam Frenchum) and Ruth (Francesca Carpanini) are a young couple in the romantic early stages of a relationship which they are deepening at his remote cabin. 

Urban Ruth is full of idealistic wonder about trees, birds, the nearby lake and the feel of rain on her face. Nick isn’t, but humours her until he can no longer be bothered.

It is a painful watch, seeing hastily expressed love being unrequited. It also feels a dated trope when, as is the case here, the power imbalance is allocated by Mamet so that the emotional distance is male and emotional need is female.

The staccato dialogue of Nick’s half-expressed thoughts and Ruth’s fanciful notions about nature are not much more articulate than the chirps of birds in the nearby woods. 

Everything that comes from the earth is beautiful because it is part of a natural cycle, just like people, observes Ruth. 

“Cigarettes?” asks Nick.

Yet the darkening progress of this unravelling relationship maintains a certain grip. 

Set on and around the wood cabin’s stoop, Nick expresses that emotional distance by increasing the physical space between the two of them at every opportunity. And also by being increasingly sexually aggressive.

Mamet’s somewhat dog-eared argument here appears to be that men and women are hardwired so differently that a battle of the sexes is inevitable in every relationship. 

Back then (the play’s period suggested by the characters’ 1970s garb) the conflict was also known as a gender war, before gender become widely accepted as a fluid element of the human condition.

Frenchum feels miscast, his callous, aloof Nick at odds with the actor’s innate good blokeishness. 

But in her British debut, Carpanini is masterful. 

The American actress heroically updates Mamet’s take on relationships with a performance that is wincingly needy for much of the uninterrupted 90 minutes, then twists Ruth’s meek acceptance of her destiny as it exists on the page.

Carpanini turns it into something knowing, bitter and damning of the man who now needs Ruth more than Ruth needs him.