Almeida; Hampstead, London
Rupert Goold doesn't take over as artistic director until August, but already there is a glimmer of him at the Almeida in this joint production with his Headlong company. Seriousness and showmanship, giant themes and whirling projections, come together in Chimerica. Lucy Kirkwood's new play has eyes that are bigger than its stomach. Still, things are much better (and much rarer) that way round.
Set in Beijing and Manhattan, sliding between the last US election and the moment when tanks rolled towards demonstrators in Tiananmen Square 24 years ago, it tackles the veracity of photojournalism, the attempted infiltration of China's market by western companies, the rise of air pollution and the suppression of news. Its most irritating feature is the tricksy title – from historian Niall Ferguson, who coined the word in The Ascent of Money. Its best things are its least pretentious features: narrative range and, far too unusual in the theatre, thriller drive.
Lyndsey Turner's impressive, rapidly paced production makes a play with awkward aspects look sleek and purposeful. Es Devlin's design spins a cube around the stage. Covered in grey images – the square, the tanks – from contact sheets marked with a red pen, it's whisked along with music, opening out into glimpses of Manhattan and Beijing. Occasionally the intention becomes too apparent and results in a pictorial flurry with an actor striking an attitude. Mostly the fizz of constantly changing images sweeps the action along.
It is Kirkwood's ambition that is exhilarating. Her characterisations are less surprising. The photographer at the centre of the play, said to have taken pictures of Tiananmen Square but not based on an actual snapper, is a corny amalgam: idealistic but personally absent, charismatic but negligent. Stephen Campbell Moore fleshes him out elegantly with staunch nonchalance. The girlfriend who swings between east and west, and between commercial hard-headheadness and romantic sweetness, is played with exceptional delicacy by Claudie Blakley. She has always been a good actor but has often been slightly undercast, playing to the natural strengths of her distinctive crackling voice and witty face: she is a shoo-in for any Restoration drama. Here she is doing something completely different, so that she is on the brink of making herself unrecognisable. What more could a star ask?
Theatre, so long accused of being in thrall to liberal dogma, is being washed with contrary waves. Following the acerbic Neil LaBute and the sceptical humanity of Bruce Norris, we have had Ayad Akhtar's quizzing of Muslim inheritance in Disgraced, and now David Mamet setting himself to provoke with a challenge to the idea of affirmative action. No doubt Mamet would be pleased to know that I dislike Race. I am, after all, plumb in the middle of his target area: white, liberal and female. Yet can he really want to make his audience feel so clobbered by every minute of this play?
Mamet wants to tell us that it's impossible for people with black skin and people with white skin to speak truthfully about each other in America. By which he really means that a black accuser will always be privileged over a white accused. He sets his play up to prove his case.
First seen in America in 2009, a year after Obama's election, Race has a plot that looks eerily ahead to the case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn. A rich white businessman is accused of raping a black maid in a hotel. Two lawyers – one black, one white – are considering whether to take his case; they are assisted by a black female pupil, the villain of the piece.
For Mamet the theatre is a courtroom – a battleground in which judgment rather than justice is at stake. In Race it's an arena for arguments rather than human beings. Dialogue is the action. Every line is a shot of testosterone. And every line is tremendously well delivered by the relaxed, astringent Clarke Peters and by Jasper Britton, a study of paunchy wiliness.
Clumpy plotting is almost disguised by verbal nimbleness in Terry Johnson's whip-along production. Almost but not quite. For all its air of disillusioned grittiness, the drama has a couple of twists (one involving an incriminating postcard) so unlikely as to touch on fantasy. So eager is Mamet to set up the woman lawyer as untrustworthy – we are on double Oleanna territory here, with an unreliable woman accuser and a lying female lawyer – that he implausibly allows her male superiors to be gulled by her. His wheeze is that political correctness won't allow whiteys to acknowledge her dubiousness. There is a tiny point here but not enough for a drama.