A recent all-female production of Glengarry Glen Ross at London’s Old Vic gave audiences the chance to revisit one of the defining plays of modern American theatre. It also raised the question of whether a work so deeply associated with male aggression and competition looks different when performed by women.

Written by David Mamet and first staged in 1983, Glengarry Glen Ross remains one of the most influential dramas of the past half-century. It won the Pulitzer Prize, inspired a celebrated film adaptation, and helped establish Mamet as one of America’s most distinctive playwrights.

I have spent years researching David Mamet as part of an upcoming biography. He’s a writer often described as both the “poet laureate” and the “zoologist” of American macho culture. Throughout his career he has returned repeatedly to men at work: salesmen, con artists, soldiers, businessmen and hustlers. His plays explore competition, status, power and the rituals through which men establish dominance over one another.

No work embodies those concerns more completely than Glengarry Glen Ross. Once described as “Death of a Fuckin’ Salesman”, the play openly acknowledges its debt to Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman while updating it for the harsher economic climate of late-20th-century America. Where Miller’s tragedy is steeped in disappointment and regret, Mamet’s world is driven by desperation, cynicism and........

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