Oleanna's erotic dive

Julia Stiles as student Carol and Aaron Eckhart as the professor in Oleanna

Be prepared for surprises. A famous play that 11 years ago caused an uproar of boos and hisses on Broadway and inspired some men attending the London premiere to applaud its hero for attacking a defenceless young woman, has lost most of its capacity to enrage or disturb.

The Garrick First Night audience reacted with placid docility to David Mamet's male nightmare of political correctness running rampant in America: Aaron Eckhart's American professor, John, unjustly faces ruin at the vengeful hand of Julia Stiles's disturbed female student, Carol, who accuses him of rape, sexism and elitism, thereby ensuring that he ends up losing his new home and probably his job.

Nowadays though, Political Correctness, that cultural bug-bear of Nineties America and the engine of destruction in Oleanna, is no longer reckoned to be a truly threatening form of cultural fascism.

The audience response, with which I concurred, would not have disgraced a convention of nuns. This listless production has had the crucial, sexual undercurrent that surges between the lines, suppressed, presumably by director Lindsay Posner.

This sexual element, if played to the full, can do something to redress the balance in a play about dangerous power games and a bitter war of words which is grossly weighted in the professor's favour.

If there had been something covertly flirtatious and sexual about John's attitude to Carol, who feels defeated and confused by university coursework, then her subsequent, wild accusations of improper behaviour, elitism and sexism, might be accepted as the reaction of a girl smitten by a married man behaving unfairly.

But the handsome Eckhart, who on screen coolly smoulders with sex appeal, here musters all the erotic drive of a donkey cart. His waving hands, pointing fingers and shrugging shoulders become a nagging, asexual distraction. His voice, when stressed, becomes a hoarse rasp. He is no more at home and natural on stage than a cat on a hot tin roof.

Moreover, his interchanges with Stiles's attractive, woebegone Carol remain dutifully, dully pedagogic. When he puts a consoling arm around the weeping girl's shoulder there is no sympathy in the gesture.

Stiles's attractive student, blonde hair suitably dishevelled and face unpainted, is by contrast as distressed, incoherent and believable as Mamet allows: her reappearance in John's office in the second act beggars belief.

For the professor would hardly allow Carol admission since she has already reported him to the university authorities. Stiles now wears an expression of truculent disdain.

She has been abruptly transformed from bemused student to eloquent, politically correct accuser who describes John's sympathetic hand on her shoulder as an indecent act. She even concocts a false charge of rape.

If only her character assassination of the professor were not so extreme and devastating Oleanna would not lapse into windy, strident blasts of melodrama

Mamet certainly launches a powerful attack on the dangers of Political Correctness, its habit of destroying the integrity of language and suppressing freedom of expression. Stiles duly becomes a convincing, implacable Agent of Male Destruction.

Eckhart's professor, for whom bad news about his house keeps arriving on the imperious telephone, is finally goaded to a violence that I hope, but am not certain, Mamet's hysterical play abhors.

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