CHRISTOPHER SMITH Not the death of a salesman when he comes home, but two days in the lives of real estate pushers in the office that has become something like an anteroom of hell, David Mamet's all-male American play is abrasive, disturbing in its insights and corrosive in its implications.

CHRISTOPHER SMITH

Not the death of a salesman when he comes home, but two days in the lives of real estate pushers in the office that has become something like an anteroom of hell, David Mamet's all-male American play is abrasive, disturbing in its insights and corrosive in its implications.

The predicaments are painful, the reactions often tragic, but there is hard-boiled humour too and the personal inflexibility of farce, though the audience at Sewell Barn seems too shell-shocked to laugh quite as much as it might.

They always keep up the patter and sometimes bawl one another out, even if they can't sell much. In fact, because they can't, and that's what hurts.

In Michelle Montague's production, Don Millwood is a weak-kneed, wide-mouthed Shelly, grasping at straws, Tom Watson a lugubrious George, and Dylan Baldwin a scorchingly determined Richard. Calmer at least in appearance and of a rather different cut because in management, not in sales, Tony Walton keeps his sinister cool to provide telling contrast.

There is a plot line but really it is really no more than a scaffold for a sequence of carefully observed episodes. In each one of them the tension builds up to almost unendurable intensity.

t Further performances, this May 1-4, 7.30pm.