The image is one of desperation, as befits Malkovich’s character, a film mogul by the name of Barney Fein who has been laid low by his own sexual malfeasance. That name suggests a certain Harvey Weinstein, but Fein’s struggle to get to his feet can’t help but make a playgoer think of Mamet himself, a titan of stage and screen whose finest work seems to be receding from view.
Word that Mamet was working on a play in response to the #MeToo movement emerged in early 2018. But little was said about the project, leading to rampant speculation about how Mamet — a playwright not known for delicacy — would approach the story of Weinstein’s alleged sexual misconduct. The program for “Bitter Wheat” may insist on its story as “a piece of fiction” whose self-evident equivalencies are “entirely coincidental,” but curiosity has loomed large as to how that role of one powerful, wealthy man in the #MeToo movement would play out in the hands of another powerful, wealthy man.
“Bitter Wheat” is unlikely to reverse the prevailing feeling that Mamet has skidded off course of late, despite the attachment of big names to his works — like Al Pacino, who starred in the poorly received “China Doll” on Broadway in 2015, or Malkovich, on hand on this occasion as commercial catnip. Mamet has always seemed to be an equal-opportunity offender, with targets ranging from vegans to Jews to the mother of Fein’s (unseen) children. But “Bitter Wheat,” bilious to a fault, also feels scattershot and lazy, problems exacerbated by Mamet’s surprisingly slack direction. Two scene changes in the first act slow the proceedings just when the tension should be ratcheting up, notwithstanding the presence of an A-list design team in Christopher Oram (sets and costumes) and Neil Austin (lighting), both of whom are Tony winners.
A duologue in a restaurant merely reminds you how much crisper and tenser were the comparable exercises in coercion in “Glengarry Glen Ross,” the Mamet masterwork that had its own world premiere in London, in 1983. And as a study in the daily depredations meted out by Hollywood heavies, “Bitter Wheat” has nothing on “Speed-the-Plow,” a savage comedy from 1988 that reappears fairly regularly on the London stage. (Lindsay Lohan led its last West End revival, in 2014.)
But what of Barney Fein as a character study: an ego in extremis who has everything in the world except, the play rather laboriously makes clear, self-love? Malkovich certainly commands attention as a tuxedoed tyrant who at the start eviscerates a writer (played by Matthew Pidgeon, Mamet’s brother-in-law) whose work makes him “puke,” to co-opt Fein’s chosen word. (A fair amount of the play’s language is far less easily quoted.)
The sorry fact is that Fein never deepens or darkens as the (relatively brief) two acts unfold. The character is reprehensible well before he meets Yung Kim Li (Ioanna Kimbook), a Cambridge-educated Korean actress to whom he proffers stardom in return for a neck rub and more. As satirical gambits go, the notion of casting her in a gay retelling of the Anne Frank story must rank somewhere pretty low. It’s either that, we’re told, or an Asian reboot of “Gone With the Wind.”
Kimbook, making her professional theater debut, adroitly communicates a gathering wariness giving way to fear, and there’s not nearly enough of Doon Mackichan, who plays Sondra, Fein’s intriguingly complicit personal assistant. Alas, the playwright isn’t interested in either female character. Sondra, for example, exists to inform her boss of his own mother’s birthday or of that same ailing woman’s death at the hands of an illegal immigrant. (One takeaway from the play might well be the perils of shopping at Bergdorf Goodman.)
After the intermission, the play loses what scant energy it had and takes a self-pitying turn that does neither Fein nor his creator any favors. Malkovich, his signature gift for vocal insinuation intact, takes particular delight in invoking Hannibal Lecter when he says the name Clarice — a secret code borrowed from the “Silence of the Lambs” heroine. The actor’s spidery fingers exert their own chill as they trace the ease with which such predators take control.
Fine actor though he is, not even Malkovich can ride out the faux-psychology of Fein’s climactic lament. “I molested various actresses, as who has not,” Fein says by way of defense, as his accusers grow in number and Oscars are revoked. A “deeply flawed human being” adrift in a “wicked” world, Fein, we’re meant to understand, might have been a more humane and decent person had he been able to lose weight. Really? A diet would have put everything right?
I’m not at all sure that Fein’s story, or that of the man who inspired him, is as simple as that, but “Bitter Wheat” would be considerably better were it more fleshed out. That’s assuming, of course, that it had to be written at all.