THEATRE / Life lessons from a Mamet's boy

'YOU DON'T go into the 'Exact Change' without the exact change]' roars Kevin McNally at his fellow kidnappers, having just suffered the humiliation of having to touch their victim for the price of a motorway toll. Sound advice; but like everything else for the luckless trio in David Epstein's Exact Change, it comes too late. The victim paid up and then escaped.

If they had understood the perils of running up a debt with the Mafia, of investing in soya beans, of hijacking a dentist in a self-locking car, they might have still been sitting pretty in a New Jersey bar instead of shivering in a Bronx warehouse waiting for the police to arrive. They feel the injustice keenly. They are no dumber than countless other Americans. Why does everything they try turn into another 'god- damned learning experience'?

You will already have caught the echoes of David Mamet. Epstein's characters recall the bungling crooks in American Buffalo, and his artfully repetitious dialogue, with its abrupt explosions and switches of register are pure Mamet. So is the opening scene where the first two partners hurtle into the bar after a nasty fright in the street. Bompkee (Mike McShane) staggers off stage to vomit. Merola (Steven O'Shea) starts frenziedly cleaning the stains off his prized leather coat. It is only with the return of Botts (McNally) that we learn that a suicidal skydiver has landed at their feet outside the mob's headquarters. Next time 'Mr Face meets Mr Sidewalk' it may be their turn. So you begin by watching unexplained actions; and when exposition arrives it propels the action through the roof.

By this time, Exact Change has also parted company with Mamet and revealed itself as more than an efficient laughter- machine. Nothing halts the present-tense narrative; but, from throwaway lines, you begin to assemble detail about the past: that the trio are old buddies, all in trouble with their womenfolk, and with only each other to cling on to. Thanks to the superlative performances of Aaron Mullen's cast, they acquire individual weight inside the team - McShane an Honest Joe with reserves of psychotic violence; McNally, a leader with no sense of direction; O'Shea, a fast-talker who drives the others nuts with his success fantasies. The atmosphere between them is often murderous, but nothing is ever going to drive them apart. They are already middle-aged, and you sense a long vista of past failures, though it is against the code to mention them. At every defeat, someone says: 'The past is history, we go on from here.' More sound advice; but what this lot needs is a good dose of healthy pessimism.

So, perhaps, do other Americans, Epstein suggests; as he follows the careers of these compulsive optimists from one catastrophe to the next, changing from failed businessmen to failed crooks, and finally envisaging one sure success as McShane confides his dream of strolling into a shopping mall and slaughtering everyone in sight. One sign of this writer's quality is that he can bring the piece to such an ending without jumping the comic rails: chilling but still brilliant.

Following Bulgakov's Flight, this is the second stunning show to open at the Lyric Hammersmith within a month. Having suffered three cuts in public funding, the theatre is due to close next March. I can think of no other London house that combines such history and

architectural beauty with such artistic vitality. If you agree with that, join the 'Keep the Lyric Alive' campaign.

The same issue crops up in Mario Vargas Llosa's The Madman of the Balconies, a strongly-felt discussion piece based on a 1950s campaign to save the Renaissance-style balconies of Lima from the bulldozer. Llosa's hero is an old Italian art historian who has sacrificed his life to this cause. The strength of the piece is that it admits a full range of adversarial voices without surrendering its affection for the quixotic protagonist (beautifully played by Peter Eyre). To the city architect, the balconies are an obstacle to public health; to the corrupt bureaucrat, they bring profit; to a descendant of the Incas, they spell colonial oppression.

By such means, the delicately latticed balconies on Hettie Macdonald's stage develop a glowing metaphorical presence. They do not, however, yield a storyline. That takes shape only through the figure of the professor's daughter (Naomi Wirthner), who has been made a prisoner of his obsession. In that sense, Llosa is telling an old Spanish tale that has nothing to do with his declared theme.

When Michael Elliott staged his 1983 version of Moby Dick at the Manchester Royal Exchange, he prepared by visiting Nantucket, off the coast of Massachusetts, and whaling museums between sessions of kidney dialysis treatment. Such was his respect, even as a dying man, for Melville's work.

At Stratford's Other Place, I fear it has fallen into the hands of competitive artists. In Ron Wooden's text, the crew of the Pequod - far from being forged into Captain Ahab's instrument of vengeance - emerge from the start as a ready-made chorus, whose idiom varies between biblical cadences and T S Eliot's Women of Canterbury. Elsewhere the script pays its respects to Auden, Conrad and Rimbaud, without bothering to establish character or linear narrative. Gerry Mulgrew, who acknowledges that Mr Wooden has merely supplied him with the 'initial inspiration' for his treatment, directs a chanting, dancing, rope-pulling, shanty- singing company who deliver an ostentatious display of skills rather than the account of a voyage. The production is a shambles. David Calder gallantly returned to the show after suffering a back injury; but, judging by his tentative Ahab, he returned too soon.

'Exact Change', Lyric, Hammersmith, 081-741 2311. 'Madman of the Balconies', Gate, 071-229 0706. 'Moby Dick', Other Place, Stratford, 0789-295623.