[Lahr is a prizewinning American critic, nonfiction writer, playwright, novelist, biographer, and editor. In the review below, he offers a highly favorable assessment of The Cryptogram, lauding the work's dramatic intensity and focus on betrayal, death, and emotional abuse.]

David Mamet, like the characters he puts onstage, tells us only so much about himself, and no more. We know, for instance, that he likes tricksters and magic. We know that he enjoys guys' things, like hunting and poker and cigars. We also know that he's divorced, and that, like any divorced parent, he has had to live with the grief of imposing on his children the bewildering pain of separation which he felt when his own parents divorced. In "The Rake," the first chapter of a 1992 memoir entitled The Cabin: Reminiscence and Diversions, Mamet has provided a rare and chilling snapshot of himself and his sister, Lynn, growing up with their new stepfather in a Chicago suburb. Mamet dredges up from the mystery of childhood a few images and scraps of half-understood conversation which have etched themselves on his imagination. He tells of his sister's hearing raised voices and following them down the corridor to the master bedroom, where she pushed open the door to see their mother coiled in a fetal position on the floor of the closet "moaning and crying and hugging herself," and their tyrannical stepfather gesturing toward the bed, on which the children's grandfather, their mother's father, was slumped. "Say the words," the stepfather was saying to the grandfather. "Say the words, Jack. Please. Just say you love her." Mamet writes, "And my grandfather said, 'I can't.'" Mamet's sister was hit in the face with a hairbrush for bearing witness to this humiliation. Such bleak and brutal terrain—full of cloaked threat and blighted feeling—is a large part of Mamet's emotional inheritance. He survived to dramatize its wary and perverse psychological climate—a ferocious, repressed atmosphere in which, out of fear and impotence and shame, people become willed strangers to themselves, and in which the cunning thrust and parry of language becomes a carapace that cuts them off from both the world and their own murky feelings.

The Cryptogram, Mamet's newest play, which recently had its world premiére at the Ambassadors Theatre, in London, is a difficult but important drama, in which Mamet works his way back to childhood—specifically, to that irrevocable, buried moment in a child's life when the safety net of the parental embrace collapses, and the world, once full of blessing, is suddenly full of danger. The play, which consists of three terse scenes, takes place in 1959 (Mamet was born in 1947), and Mamet's surrogate, John, is "about ten." Bob Crowley's beautifully painted set is dominated by a huge stairway, which winds its way up toward the flies, and a backcloth of behemoth zones of blue-green and charcoal gray separated by a band of pink. Like a Rothko painting (which the backcloth resembles), the play is about the resonance of contradictory and puzzling emotional intensities; and the staircase becomes an image of the almost unbridgeable space between the muffled grownup world downstairs and the child's insecure purdah upstairs.

Mamet foreshadows the play's moral debate in the opening beats. Here, in Gregory Mosher's vivid production, John's first words are "I couldn't find 'em." John (superbly played by the precocious Richard Claxton, who alternates in the role with the equally adroit Danny Worters) is apparently talking about a pair of slippers he has packed for a camping trip with his father, which is scheduled for the next day; but what John really can't find in the environment of subterfuge and coded speech which engulfs him is the reality of his parents and of his own emotional life. John can't sleep. This is a familiar enough childhood complaint, and the family friend Del (well played by the pudgy, weak-faced comedian Eddie Izzard) tries to jolly him out of it in a cozy late-night man-to-man. "Where were we?" Del asks. John answers with a formal phrase obviously borrowed from earlier arguments with the adults. "Issues of sleep," he says. The phrase turns panic into a debating point, but we soon learn that John's sleep-lessness is chronic. "Every night. Every night. There's some excuse. Some reason," says Donny, John's mother, played by the subtle Lindsay Duncan, whose pale elegance here disguises a steely detachment. Despite Del's special pleading and the excitement of the upcoming trip, Donny wants John upstairs and in bed. "Why aren't you asleep?" is her entrance line. John has picked up some anxiety that the household refuses to acknowledge. "Why isn't Dad home?" he asks Del, who takes the conversation in another direction. Later in the scene, John tells his mother, "I want to wait til he comes home." His request is stone-walled by apparent reasonableness. "Well, yes, I'm sure you do," Donny says. "But you need your sleep. And if you don't get it, you're not …"

Sleeplessness, not John's fear, is what Del and Donny want to contain. No one deals with John's feelings or tries to alleviate them. The audience starts to feel a certain highly charged and unspoken frustration—a kind of emotional static. Mamet puts the audience where the child sits, taking the characters at face value, only to have its will to believe confounded by those characters' mixed messages. Psychological truth is never acknowledged. In fact, it is scrambled—like a cryptogram—so that everything means something else. The play's uncluttered living room, composed merely of two sofas covered with red blankets, becomes an impenetrable landscape of denial. Mamet announces the pattern brilliantly, with the offstage crash of Donny's teapot, which precedes her first entrance. "I'm alright!" Donny shouts from the wings. "I'm alright!" Clearly she's not all right, and Del uses the shattered teapot to draw an avuncular parallel between the anticipated camping trip and John's edginess:

DEL: Well, there you go.

JOHN: What?

DEL: … a human being …

JOHN: … yes?

DEL: … cannot conceal himself.

JOHN: that, that's, that's an example?

DEL: Well, hell, look at it: anything, when it is changed … any, um um, "upheaval," do you see? All of a sudden …

A broken teapot an "upheaval"? Del seems to be trying to ascribe John's sleeplessness to the prospect of a change of scenery, but his stumbling and inappropriate choice of words is confusing. Something—everything—is being concealed. But what? Nothing is ever directly stated. Even John's straightforward question about his father—"Where is he?"—gets a confused and confusing answer from Donny. "I don't know. Yes, I do, yes. He's at the Office. And he'll be home soon." She seems to know, and yet not to know, that something is awry. John's situation is never resolved; his anxieties and his questions are never answered. When John is sent to tidy up the attic, and reappears with a blanket—a totemic family object in which he was wrapped as a baby—the blanket turns out to be torn. John thinks he has torn it, but Donny knows he hasn't. Even this projection of John's unspoken fear of having caused a rip in the fabric of the family is muddied by Del. "Because we think a thing is one way does not mean that this is the way that this thing must be," Del says. The evasions are confusing, and are meant to be. John's caretakers interrupt him, and confound him with doubletalk. At the end of the scene, John's worst fears are confirmed. A note somehow materializes. "When did this get here?" Donny asks, and after she's read it she sends John to bed. "Alright. I understand. I'm going," he says, knowing, without quite knowing, that the worst has happened. His father will not be going on the camping trip, or coming home. The dialogue that ends the first scene has a flat, matter-of-fact tone, but in the subsequent scenes it turns out to be part of a whole narrative of fraudulence:

DEL: What is it?

DONNY: It's a letter. (Pause.) Robert's leaving me.

DEL: He's leaving you. (Pause.) Why would he want to do that …?

"I thought that maybe there was nothing there," John says to Donny at the beginning of Scene 2, explaining a kind of brainstorm about the nature of reality. And, of course, he's right: what Mamet is about to unravel is the charade of human connection. John is starting to fragment before our eyes, and his night sweats—in this case, voices and spectres that accompany his fear of abandonment and his sense of annihilation—are now coming out in his questions. "And how do we know the things we know?" he says. "And, and we don't know what's real. And all we do is say things." What Del says when he enters is that he has looked all over town for Robert and can't find him. He brings medicine for John. (The medicine that John really needs is love, but this is never offered.) John finally breaks down and buries his head in his mother's lap. "What's happening to me?" he says. Donny embraces him. "It's alright," she says "Hush. You go to bed. It's alright. John. Shh. You've only got a fever. Shhh." It's a fierce and ironic moment: an act of violence couched in the language of love. Donny acts as if the truth would kill her son, but what's killing him is untruth.

The truth—a network of betrayals—is hard to admit or discover. Once John is safety upstairs, Del opens a bottle of whiskey, and he and Donny toast their friendship—a kind of strangulated toast, in which Del, who is gay but later confesses love for Donny, angles clumsily for some acknowledgment of deeper feeling from her:

DONNY: May We Always be as …

DEL: Yes.

DONNY: As …

DEL: Unified …

DONNY: Well, let's pick something more moving than that.

DEL: Alright … be. be. be. be. be-nighted? No, that's not the word I want to use … be-trothed …? No.

DONNY: Close …

DEL: Yes.

DONNY: Close to each other.

DEL: As we happen to be right now.

Within a few minutes, though, Del is caught out in a lie about a knife he has used to open the whiskey. He claims that Robert gave it to him on a camping trip the previous week, but Donny has seen it more recently, in the attic. This leads to the revelation that Del lent Robert his apartment for a tryst and used the camping trip as a decoy—a collusion for which he was rewarded with the knife, Robert's cherished "war memento," which proves later to be as inauthentic as Del's shows of sincerity. Del, it turns out, is caught between an allegiance to the absent Robert and a yearning for Donny, who flirts with him but is finally uninterested. The audience hardly has time to tally up the extent of his fabrications. Del, who planted the "Dear Donny" letter, has known all along about Robert's adultery and abandonment of his family. Del's badinage with John, the story about looking for Robert, the toast to Donny and friendship—all are flimflam. "I'm sorry that it came out like this," he says to her. Then, having deliberately lied to Donny, he proceeds to lie to himself. "But we can't always choose the …" These revelations are interrupted by John's returning from upstairs to recount his own revelation: "I'm perfectly alone." And he is.

We see just how alone John is in the last, and best, scene, which takes place a month later, with Donny and John packing up to leave the house. Here, especially, Lindsay Duncan—one of England's finest actresses—brings Donny into bold, monstrous relief. John has suicide on his mind. "Do you ever wish that you could die?" he asks his mother, who replies ambivalently, "How can I help you, John?" She is, as Mamet shows, killing him slowly with kindness. "Things occur," she tells him. "And the meaning of them … the meaning of them … is not clear." But meaning, we see, is being consciously and unconsciously subverted. "If I could find one man," Donny bleats to Del, who has returned with the knife to "attune" for his sins. "In my life. Who would not betray me." Donny's rancor has a self-hypnotic power, but in fact Donny has betrayed John and Del, just as Del has betrayed Donny and John; and Robert, it turns out, has betrayed all three. When John appears on the stairway to interrupt her aria of victimization. Donny turns on her boy with unbridled fury. "Do you have no feelings?" she says. "I don't CARE. Go away. Leave me. Do you hear? You lied. You lied to me. I love you, but I can't like you. I'm sorry." Of course, it's Donny (and the other adults) who has lied to John; but John stands there, bewildered, trying vainly to make himself heard above Donny's double binds. All he wants is the blanket—his security blanket—but it has been packed. In a gesture typical of the adults' psychological obtuseness, Del gives John the knife to open the package. John, who has already broadcast suicidal thoughts, is called to attention on the stairway by Donny; she doesn't want to disarm him but, instead, to accuse him furiously of doing to her what she in fact is doing to him. "What are you standing there for?" she says. "Can't you see that I need comfort? Are you blind? Are you blind? That you treat me like an animal? What must I do?" It is a searing moment of emotional abuse. At the finale, John is looking down over the bannister at Donny and Del. He flicks the knife. The blade jolts into view with a startling thwack—a chilling sound that holds out the promise, as the lights fade, of murderous fury directed at John fade, of murderous fury directed at John himself or at the world.

Mamet chose to attack the world, and The Cryptogram goes some way toward illuminating the source of the cruelty and faithlessness that his characters generally find in it. The shifting ground of the play makes it hard to engage with, but its aftershock is enormous. The Cryptogram may be short, but it is not miniature. The oblique, brilliant dialogue is not underwritten, nor are the characters unexplored. With remarkable concision and insight, Mamet has mapped out the dynamics of a soul murder. This daring, dark, complex play got respectful though mixed notices in London, but I suspect that in time it will take its place among Mamet's major works.