David Mamet is a master craftsman, as this sparkling world premiere shows
Keep Your Pantheon Radio 4
Jon Ronson On . . . Radio 4
David Mamet's Keep Your Pantheon, the world premiere of which we were treated to on Bank Holiday Monday (2.15pm), contained the best defence of acting I have ever heard. It came from the actor-manager Strabo, struggling to stay afloat and, indeed, alive in ancient Rome. "I am an actor, a man whose life at best is a series of shams. We make nothing, neither farm nor fish nor hunt. We are debarred from bearing arms. We are despised, and perhaps rightly so, by those who toil in the world - but for that moment, that one moment on the stage, when we are permitted to make them laugh or cry in sympathy, not even with ourselves, good sir, but for that better being we impersonate. For we ourselves are nothing . . ."
The man he is directing this to, his jailer, is impressed, so impressed that he hails Strabo's skills as an actor. He recognises this passionate plea for mercy as a rip-off from Plautus's Metathon: an actor speaks from the heart yet it is still a kind of counterfeit. I had never heard of the Metathon and neither had my search engine, so I suspect that Mamet, in fact, made this up. It is the sort of intertextual joke he would come up with for a piece about deception and perception. These, the great playwright's oft-visited themes, found a neat home for themselves in this tight, sparkling Roman farce. Had Frankie Howerd walked on in a toga it would have been perfect.
Subtitled On the Whole I Would Rather Be in Mesopotamia, it left you glad it wasn't your job to entertain a martial empire obsessed with its own military vulnerability. I suspect Mamet, as an American, knows the feeling. Strabo had some great patter on the subject. He knew all about legionaries. Their swords came in three sizes - small, medium and thank-you-for-a-lovely-evening. (One of Mamet's jokes here was that homosexuality was the Roman norm and marriage the perversion.)
The 10th Legion was conducting a funeral ceremony for fallen comrades, having suffered its first ever defeat, and Strabo, not for the first time, one suspected, led his troupe through the wrong door. The actors were arrested, but even in his cell Strabo hoped that a scheme - or, to use the theatrical argot, "a plot" - might spring them. What about knocking out the guard and dressing up as him? "What, all of us?" asked a colleague. Another planned deception involved passing off a beggar as a Sicilian lord who would offer to buy their leaking theatre off their importunate landlord.
Strabo's schemes recalled those of Face and Subtle in The Alchemist, another play about theatrical illusion. Like Jonson's characters, Strabo has no redeeming features except his talent for deception. In the end he sent his own romantic interest, a hopeless apprentice actor, to his landlord. He had, he told him, "that which is greater than talent: a cheerful outlook". Full of running gags and catchphrases, Keep Your Pantheon showed Mamet off as the craftsman he is. Martin Jarvis stole the show as the unscrupulous actor-manager, though I kept imagining Jimmy Edwards in the role. It was directed at a cracking pace by Rosalind Ayres, with whom Jarvis runs the production company that made it.
Deception was no laughing matter in the first of Jon Ronson's new series of believe-it-or-not investigations (29 May, 11pm), despite the sly humour with which Ronson conducts them. Here he helped Mary Turner Thomson tell the story of her internet date from hell, in which the enigma of her chivalrous yet unreliable boyfriend was apparently solved when he admitted that he worked for the CIA. The funny thing was that Will Jordan was such a good liar, he probably could have done. In fact he was a conman, paedophile and bigamist with 11 children by seven women, and is now in jail. The show ended with a discussion with a psychologist who reckoned 4 per cent of the population are sociopaths of the Jordan type, and that a good number of them are in politics. Jordan must have been an even better actor than Strabo to fool this intelligent woman for quite so long. Even now, she said, she could not work out some of his deceptions. "But you don't need to know how a magician does a trick to know it isn't magic."
Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times
Pick of the week
The Making of Music
Starts 4 June, 3.45pm, Radio 4
James Naughtie with the history of music in 30 episodes . . .
The Making of Music
Starts 4 June, 4pm, Radio 3
. . . then switch over and hear some of it performed.
Mr Simon's Big Trip
5 June, 10.30pm, Radio 2
Paul Simon in the UK in 1965; he dreamt of being "Homeward Bound".
Don't Miss... Damien Hirst: Beyond Belief
To Hirst, "Art is a map of a person's life," and this exhibition will focus on his obsessions: birth and death. The Fact Paintings depict the birth of his son Cyrus by Caesarean section, and the Biopsy Paintings (detail shown right) depict cancer and other terminal diseases. The centrepiece of the exhibition is a platinum cast of a human skull, covered entirely with diamonds. Love him or hate him, this show is bound to be the talk of the town.
White Cube Galleries, London N1 and London SW1, from 3 June until 7 July. http://www.whitecube.com
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