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Damian Lewis and John Goodman Head Up This Starry West End of David Mamet’s Classic Play About Small Time Crooks – April 28, 2015

Damian Lewis and John Goodman head up this starry West End of David Mamet’s classic play about small time crooks

by Andrzej Lukowski – Time Out London – 28 April 2015

It would be mean, cheap and generally a bit dickish to say that Damian Lewis’s big post-‘Homeland’, post-‘Wolf Hall’ return to the London stage is overshadowed by some comedy facial hair. Nonetheless: if you think the above photo of his moustache is a bit on the distracting side then seriously, you should see the thing live.

David Mamet’s classic 1975 play ‘American Buffalo’ is a three hander, and in Daniel Evans’s enjoyable but busy production, Lewis, rising Brit talent Tom Sturridge, and old American hand John Goodman each sort of do their own thing to entertaining if not entirely cohesive effect.

Paul Wills’s impressively overstuffed set is a Chicago junkshop belonging to Goodman’s Don. Essentially a small-time crook, he has worked himself into a grump because he sold a rare American Buffalo nickel to a haughty stranger, and has now concluded that it was worth a lot more than the $90 he flogged it for. His solution is to rob the man’s house to get the coin back, and he has taken the rather unwise decision of enlisting Sturridge’s fragile young junkie Bob to help him. But his preening, neurotic hustler friend Teach (Lewis) has got wind: he wants in, and Bob out.

Read the rest of the original article at Time Out London