What happens in Glengarry Glen Ross?
Four Chicago real-estate salesmen are selling worthless plots of Florida land under names like Glengarry Highlands and Glen Ross Farms. Head office has announced a sales contest: the top two closers keep their jobs, the bottom two are fired. The only thing that matters is the "leads" — the names of prospective buyers — and the good ones are locked in the office manager's drawer.
Act one: the restaurant
Three short scenes in a Chinese restaurant across the road. Shelley Levene, once a top closer and now on a losing streak, begs and then tries to bribe the office manager, Williamson, for the premium leads. Dave Moss floats a plan to George Aaronow: break into the office, steal the leads, sell them to a rival firm — and make Aaronow the one who does it. And Richard Roma, the office's current star, slowly works a stranger, James Lingk, into buying land he does not want.
Act two: the office
The next morning the office has been burgled and the leads are gone. A detective, Baylen, interviews the salesmen one by one while the working day carries on around them. Levene arrives triumphant from a big sale. Lingk arrives wanting his money back. Roma and Levene improvise a double act to stall him, and Williamson's one careless remark blows it apart — which leads Levene, in fury, to say the one thing he should never have said.
This production
Marber's staging kept Mamet's text and character names intact with an all-female cast, played in the round on Rob Howell's set, lit by Sally Ferguson, running approximately 1 hour 25 minutes without an interval. Age guidance 16+ for very strong language.
Background: Mamet, Marber and The Old Vic
The play
David Mamet wrote Glengarry Glen Ross from his own brief spell in a Chicago real-estate office. It premiered at the National Theatre in London in 1983, directed by Bill Bryden, before opening on Broadway in 1984, where it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The 1992 film added the "Always be closing" speech, written for Alec Baldwin, which is not in the stage play. The text is famous for its profanity, its overlapping rhythms and its total absence of women — which is precisely what this production set out to test.
Patrick Marber
Playwright of Dealer's Choice and Closer, and a Tony Award-winning director for Leopoldstadt, Marber has a long relationship with this kind of muscular, talky American drama; Dealer's Choice, his first play, is itself a study of men, money and self-deception. Casting the play entirely with women while changing nothing on the page was his way of asking whether Mamet's subject is masculinity or simply fear.
The company
Indira Varma (Game of Thrones, Obi-Wan Kenobi; Olivier Award winner for Present Laughter) played Levene, and Rosa Salazar (Alita: Battle Angel, Brand New Cherry Flavor) made her London stage appearance as Roma. Niky Wardley, Nancy Crane, Dorothea Myer-Bennett, Mercedes Bahleda and Florence Odumosu completed the seven-strong cast. Rob Howell designed set and costumes, Sally Ferguson lit it, and Charlie Hughes-D'Aeth was voice coach.
The Old Vic and Matthew Warchus
The production was part of Matthew Warchus's final season as artistic director of The Old Vic, a tenure that ran from 2015 and included Groundhog Day, A Christmas Carol and Present Laughter. Following its six-week run, the theatre moved on to Alan Ayckbourn's How the Other Half Loves and then Martin Guerre, a semi-staged preview production developed and directed by Warchus, running to 31 October 2026.
