Iona Firouzabadi
posted 1 November 2006

In Charles M Schulz's delightful and insightful cartoon strip Peanuts, there's a philosophising kid called Linus, who is very attached to a blanket. Linus takes his blanket everywhere with him. He loves his blanket. It's a 'security blanket' (Schulz coined the term), a symbol of childhood dependency. The blanket is whimsical and it's comic and it works. It's a great blanket.

David Mamet has a blanket too. His blanket is also a symbol of childhood. It appears in a play he wrote called The Cryptogram, which is currently in revival at the Donmar Warehouse. Unfortunately David Mamet's blanket isn't whimsical or comic and it doesn't work. It's a bad blanket.

The Cryptogram is a short play with an un-cryptic plot. It's bedtime for John (played by Adam J Brown at the performance reviewed), a ten-year-old kid growing up in a white collar, American home in the 1950s. Tomorrow he's going on a camping trip with his father. But tonight he can't sleep. His mum, Donny (Kim Catrall) and her friend Del (Douglas Henshall) are reminiscing in the family lounge, until Donny opens a letter from her husband telling her he's leaving her. From here family scene rapidly and starkly disintegrates. A shift marked by the packing-away of the beautifully conceived, Hitchcock-esque set, as the American home is literally dismantled in order for the fractured family to move house.

In the first half John is kept company by the family blanket, but after the scene change the blanket is denied to him. It is packed away forever and all the amorphous comforts of childhood consigned with it to a shadowy box. What's more, Johnny's Mommy, Donny, handles the dispatch of the blanket with malevolence. In refusing him the blanket she rejects him - literally leaving him in the cold. It's not the subtlest symbolism you'll ever come across.

John is a preternatural child; he hears voices, bears more than a passing allusion to Hamlet and asks eerily adult questions, directing 'do you ever wish you could die?' at his mother. What we see on stage is a vision of childhood filtered through memory. John is not a naturalistic portrait of a child, but a fragment of the grown man.

Existential children are fine and dandy in theory. But Mamet's philosophising ain't exactly deep and sounds a lot like a not-very-interesting man talking to his therapist. His Hobbesian reflections include such statements as: 'I don't know what human nature is, but if I do it's bad'. Profound. At one point Kim Catrall shouts, 'And what is that? Philosophy?' - Well may she ask.

Mamet's characters are ciphers - you have to work damn hard to make them sympathetic and dramatically engaging. Unfortunately director Josie Rourke's revival doesn't work hard enough. The performances are so varnished that they really should be in a TV studio, not part of a live staging. Catrall acts in a vacuum and seems unaware that there are other actors on stage. Douglas Henshall as Del is left marooned amid Rourke's static direction, Catrall's self-absorption and Adam J Brown's monotone. The direction often sacrifices nuance in favour of quick-fire delivery, burying sequences of dialogue that could have been both darker and more comic.

As the play's programme informs us, a cryptogram is a cipher that requires a key. But as The Cryptogram reaches its philosophic denouement, all meaning is laid out on its surface, like a body on a butcher's slab. We are treated to such revelatory misanthropic slices as 'each of us is alone' and 'we're all pathetic'. Parents are perfidious, adults destroy childhood, life is rubbish and nobody will give you a blanket when you really want one. Give me Peanuts any day.

Till 25 November 2006