The catastrophe is Rebecca and Matthew Pidgeon – real-life siblings and, respectively, Mr. Mamet’s wife and brother-in-law, as Ronnie’s elder sister, Catherine the suffragette, and their brother, Dickie, the ne’er-do-well.
Matthew is just wooden and Rebecca in particular is really terrible, speaking the lines with all the nuance of Stephen Hawking’s voice box.
Although British by birth, Rebecca gives the impression of an American who has learned to speak British from a Berlitz tape and has to concentrate on the limey accent with such glassy-eyed ferocity that she might sleepwalk into the furniture.
And her lack of any natural feel for the lines is shared by Mamet himself, to whom the idiom is clearly as alien as Martian or chimp-speak. He has mastered it pedantically, but bloodlessly.
Northam and Hawthorne are OK – they can direct themselves – but actors such as Rebecca Pidgeon, who really need a director’s help, are in desperate trouble from the git-go.