For the first time in a major revival, David Mamet’s savage, Pulitzer Prize-winning portrait of desperate salesmen is performed entirely by women and staged in the round at The Old Vic by Olivier Award winner Patrick Marber, with Indira Varma and Rosa Salazar leading the company.
Glengarry Glen Ross is one of the most influential and ferocious plays of the late twentieth century: a cutthroat tale of greed, competition and how far people will go to stay afloat. This summer’s production at The Old Vic has ramped things up a notch with a genuinely landmark production where David Mamet‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning play is performed by an entirely female cast.
The cast, led by Olivier Award winner Indira Varma (Man and Superman, Present Laughter, Macbeth, Game of Thrones) and screen star Rosa Salazar (Alita: Battle Angel, Play Dirty, Bird Box), is directed in the round by Olivier Award winner Patrick Marber (Leopoldstadt).
Running from 4 June to 18 July 2026 as a centrepiece of Matthew Warchus’s final season as Artistic Director, it’s already debuted as one of the most talked-about theatrical events of the year.
View live availability for Glengarry Glen Ross tickets here
Key dates and venue
- Theatre: The Old Vic, The Cut, London SE1 8NB
- Performances: 4 June – 18 July 2026
- Staging: Performed in the round
- Tickets: On sale now
What is Glengarry Glen Ross about?
Glengarry Glen Ross plunges the audience into 48 desperate hours in the life of a Chicago real estate office, where a group of salespeople are fighting for their professional survival. Management has introduced a brutal sales contest: the top performer wins a Cadillac, second place wins a set of steak knives, and everyone at the bottom is fired.
The catch? Success depends on access to the “good leads”: the names of potential buyers, and those are being withheld from the very people who need them most.
What follows is a savage, fast-talking study of capitalism’s most unscrupulous face. As the pressure mounts, the salespeople lie, cajole, flatter, threaten and ultimately conspire, each one chasing the deal that will keep them afloat for another week. When the office is burgled overnight and the prized leads go missing, the second half becomes a tense unravelling of who did what, and why.
This is a play driven not by plot but by language and desperation: Mamet’s famously rhythmic, profane, overlapping dialogue turning the mundane business of selling into something close to combat.
Glengarry Glen Ross is funny, frightening and exhilarating and builds to a climax that strips each character bare. At its heart is a simple but devastating question: what does survival cost… and who do you become in order to achieve it?
The history of Glengarry Glen Ross
Glengarry Glen Ross had its world premiere not in America but in London, at the National Theatre in 1983, before transferring to Broadway in 1984 where it won David Mamet the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
It has since become regarded as one of the defining plays of the late twentieth century and a cornerstone of modern American drama, influencing decades of film and television writing.
The play has enjoyed numerous major revivals, attracting some of the biggest names in the business, each actor drawn by the chance to wrap their mouths around Mamet’s extraordinary dialogue.
Patrick Marber’s most recent production ran on Broadway in 2025 with a cast led by Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk, Bill Burr and Michael McKean, and proved such a hit that it was granted a two-week extension due to demand. This Old Vic staging reunites Marber with the material but reinvents it entirely with a different creative team, an in-the-round configuration, and — for the first time in a major production in the play’s 42 year history — an all-female company.
Who is in Glengarry Glen Ross?
The cast includes:
- Levene: Indira Varma (Oedipus, Game of Thrones, The Night Manager). The once-formidable salesperson now fallen on hard times and fighting to stay relevant
- Roma: Rosa Salazar (High Noon, Alita: Battle Angel). The slick, amoral top performer who leads the office
- Moss: Niky Wardley. A salesman with an aggressive streak and a lot of resentment toward the company.
- Aaronow: Nancy Crane. A meek salesman.
- Williamson: Dorothea Myer-Bennett. The office manager who controls the leads.
- Lingk: Mercedes Bahleda. A quiet man who fears his wife.
- Baylen: Florence Odumosu. A police detective who is investigating the break in.
Indira Varma stars
The casting of Indira Varma is a particular draw. An Olivier Award winner with one of the most distinguished careers on stage and screen: from Game of Thrones and The Night Manager to her acclaimed recent turn in Oedipus, she takes on Levene, arguably the play’s most poignant role: the ageing saleswoman whose best days are behind her and who knows it.
Opposite her, Rosa Salazar makes a significant London stage appearance as Roma, the magnetic, ruthless deal-closer; best known for her screen work in Alita: Battle Angel and Brand New Cherry Flavor, she brings star wattage and intensity to one of the great modern stage roles.
The playwright: David Mamet
David Mamet is one of the most important and distinctive American playwrights of the past half-century: a writer whose name has become an adjective. “Mamet-speak,” with its clipped, profane, overlapping, intensely rhythmic dialogue, transformed the way American characters speak on stage and screen.
Beyond Glengarry Glen Ross, his major plays include American Buffalo, Speed-the-Plow and Oleanna, and he has enjoyed a parallel career as a screenwriter and director, with credits including The Untouchables, Wag the Dog and Glengarry Glen Ross’s own 1992 film adaptation. Glengarry Glen Ross is widely considered his masterpiece and the fullest expression of his career-long preoccupation with masculinity, money, language and the moral compromises demanded by American capitalism.
That the play is now being staged with an all-female cast, with Mamet’s blessing, marks a notable and surprising development for a writer whose work has so often been read as a study of male behaviour specifically.
Marber reunites with Mamet
Patrick Marber is one of the sharpest theatrical minds working in Britain today, not to mention an acclaimed playwright in his own right having written Closer and Dealer’s Choice. He’s a director of considerable range, tackling projects from Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt to the recent hit revival of The Producers.
Glengarry Glen Ross is material he knows intimately, having directed the acclaimed 2025 Broadway revival, and this production marks both his Old Vic directing debut and his first reimagining of the play for an all-female company in the round.
The creative team
- Director: Patrick Marber (The Producers, Leopoldstadt, Closer)
- Writer: David Mamet
- Set & Costume: Rob Howell
- Lighting: Sally Ferguson
- Casting: Helena Palmer CDG
- Associate Director: Lily Dyble
- Associate Costume: Lucy Gaiger
- Props Supervisor: Katie Saunders for Propworks
- Wigs, Hair & Make Up: Campbell Young Associates
- Voice: Charlie Hughes-D’Aeth
- Dialect: Danièle Lydon
Screen history
Many audiences will know Glengarry Glen Ross through its 1992 film adaptation, for which Mamet wrote the screenplay and added the now-famous “Always Be Closing” speech, delivered by Alec Baldwin in a role created specially for the film.
The movie boasted an extraordinary ensemble, with Jack Lemmon, Al Pacino, Ed Harris, Alan Arkin and Kevin Spacey all starring. Pacino also received an Academy Award nomination. The film has become a cultural touchstone, one that’s endlessly quoted and referenced, particularly in depictions of high-pressure sales culture.
What the stage offers that the film cannot is the claustrophobic intensity of live performance and this production heightens that further by staging the play in the round, surrounding the action on all sides. There is nowhere for the characters, or the audience, to hide.
Mamet’s dialogue, performed live and at full velocity inches from the front row, becomes a genuinely visceral experience in a way no screen version can replicate.
Why Glengarry Glen Ross matters
When Mamet wrote Glengarry Glen Ross in the early 1980s, he was holding up a mirror to the Reagan-Thatcher era and its gospel of competition, self-reliance and winning at any cost. More than forty years on, that mirror is, if anything, in sharper focus. In a world shaped by gig-economy precarity, relentless performance metrics and the quiet brutality of the modern workplace, the play’s portrait of people pushed to their limits by an indifferent system feels strikingly contemporary.
As Patrick Marber himself has put it, the play “was written in the 1980s, but it seems to me to be about our world right now.”
The all-female staging adds a further layer of provocation. By transposing Mamet’s ferociously masculine world onto a company of women, the production asks whether greed, fear and desperation are male traits or simply human ones, and invites audiences to examine how much of what they assumed was about masculinity was, all along, about survival.
It is, as the cast themselves have said in this recent interview, a chance to take ownership of one of the great modern texts and “play with your dice.”
What to expect on the night
Glengarry Glen Ross is a sharp, fast and intense experience: a relatively short, interval-free play (in most stagings) delivered at high velocity. Expect rapid-fire, overlapping dialogue and a steadily mounting tension that builds to a genuinely gripping climax.
It is funny as often as it is brutal but make no mistake: this is muscular and confrontational theatre.
The in-the-round staging of this production places the audience on all sides of the action for a heightened, immersive, 360-degree experience. Be aware, too, that this is Mamet: the script is famous for its relentless, creative profanity, so it is not one for younger audiences.
- Running time: Approximately 90 minutes without an interval.
- Staging: Performed in the round
- Content notes: Strong language throughout, along with themes of desperation and moral compromise
Is Glengarry Glen Ross worth seeing?
In short, yes. This is one of those productions where talent, venue and concept align so completely that it feels genuinely unmissable.
You have one of the great modern plays, a director who knows it inside out and has just triumphed with it on Broadway, two compelling leads in Indira Varma and Rosa Salazar, an incredibly strong cast and the electric configuration of The Old Vic in the round… plus the cultural conversation that a first-ever all-female Glengarry Glen Ross is guaranteed to generate.
This should be at the top of the booking list for anyone who loves intense, language-driven drama, or who is curious how a classic can be transformed by a bold casting choice. As one of the final productions of Matthew Warchus’s Old Vic tenure, it also carries a real sense of occasion.
Book tickets to Glengarry Glen Ross at The Old Vic here
Plan your visit
- Theatre: The Old Vic, The Cut, London SE1 8NB
- Booking dates: 4 June- 18 July 2026
- Running time: 90 mins without an interval
- Age guidance: Recommended 16+ (very strong language)
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