Last year, top Brit director Patrick Marber helmed a Broadway production of David Mamet’s classic ’80s parable of raging capitalism and toxic masculinity Glengarry Glen Ross. Nothing unusual about that, and Kieran Culkin as hotshot real estate salesman Ricky Roma and Bob Odenkirk as his yesterday’s man colleague Shelly Levene was pretty standard casting.
Intriguingly, however, Marber stated that he’d like his production to have an all female second cast. This did not happen, whether because Marber simply couldn’t get it together in terms of casting and producers or because on reflection a gender switch would simply reconfigure the play too much to seamlessly take play during a single run. But clearly this Old Vic revival comes out of said idea. Marber aside, it’s a different creative team to the Broadway production: it more or less has to be as the 2026 Old Vic season is being staged in te round, so the New York sets and staging are no use here.
But it is an entirely female cast, with Indira Varma (pictured) as Levene and Rosa Salazar as Roma (first names aren’t given and will presumably change), with the cast rounded out by Mercedes Bahleda, Nancy Crane, Dorothea Myer-Bennett, Florence Odumosu and Niky Wardley.
It goes without saying that women can have a different energy in the workplace to men and than indeed the point of the gender swap is surely to explore that. Clearly this isn’t quite what Mamet intended (he’s been surprisingly open minded about allowing it) but it’ll be fasicnating to see how it ends up – genuinely Glengarry Glen Ross as you’ve never seen it before.
