David Mamet has approved an all-female staging of his Pulitzer-winning classic Glengarry Glen Ross for the first time. The cast of Patrick Marber’s production at The Old Vic reveal why Mamet’s savage portrait of greed and desperation belongs to everyone, not just the men who first spoke his words.
For more than four decades, David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross has stood as one of the definitive portraits of a decidedly male desperation.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning study of real estate salesmen clawing over one another for survival in a world where you close or you’re finished, director Patrick Marber has done something never done before: handed it entirely to women. And as the cast make clear, the result is less a reinvention of the text than a fresh light thrown on what was always there.
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A world of winners… and losers
At the heart of the play is a brutal premise. As Mercedes Bahleda puts it, “it’s like putting a bunch of rats in a cage and saying, hey, there’s one piece of cheese, let’s see what kind of humans you are.“
That pressure-cooker dynamic: of people pushed to the edge and revealing their true selves is what gives the play its enduring charge. Niki Wardley describes characters caught in freefall: “When the ground starts to shift under your feet and what used to work, it’s all changing, and it’s them trying to find where they fit in this new crazy world.“
It’s a world defined by loss, and by people scrambling to hold on to status that’s slipping through their fingers. “A couple of the characters had their glory days, and they’re now being taken away from them,” says Florence Odumosu, “and that in itself is a real shift in identity.“
Scrabbling for a foothold in the scree
For Dorothea Myer-Bennett, that precariousness is the engine of the whole play: “Everybody has so much to lose, and the vulnerability is what creates these monsters.“
Indira Varma sees the same thing from the inside out: “there’s like these emotional cores vibrating in each of these characters.“
Mamet and the alternate lens
The decision to stage Mamet’s hyper-masculine world with an all-female company is singular and, notably, one made with the playwright’s blessing.
“It’s the first time David Mamet has said yes, please let’s explore that,” says Myer-Bennett. The casting, Rosa Salazar suggests, reveals less difference than you might expect. “What’s interesting about it is the similarities and the lack of differences. It’s about the ideas.“
Reframing the narrative
That, perhaps, is the provocation at the centre of this Glengarry Glen Ross: that the greed, the fear and the ferocity Mamet wrote are not male traits but human ones. As Bahleda frames it, the production is about “taking ownership of something, and then saying we’re going to play with your dice.“
The prospect of hearing, as Myer-Bennett puts it, “those female voices in this very masculine world” is one she believes will be both “really entertaining and maybe a little bit eye-opening.“
Perhaps Varma sums up the appeal best, as well as the reason Glengarry Glen Ross is one of the most anticipated productions of the season. “I want to see this show,” she says, “because I don’t know what to expect from it.“
For a limited time only: book tickets for Glengarry Glen Ross and save up to 61%
Glengarry Glen Ross plays at The Old Vic until 18 July 2026.
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