In 1969 David Mamet worked in a tacky Chicago real-estate office alongside men who were flogging “worthless land to elderly people who couldn’t afford it” and, he added, had the wit, charm, energy and chutzpah to sell cancer to them too. Fourteen years later, the result was “Glengarry Glen Ross”: so titled because the Florida lots being offered by his four estate agents, far from being the Scots-style pastures projected onto the front curtain between acts, are probably bits of swamp custom-designed for alligators.

James Macdonald’s West End revival, the first major one for 13 years, confirms that this is maybe Mamet’s strongest, boldest play. Certainly Jonathan Pryce and his fellow actors reinforce the dramatist’s reputation as the bard of four-letter brashness, the laureate of streetwise barbarism, a writer who creates a brazen, gaudy poetry that’s also absolutely purposeful and functional. If you fell into the clutches of Aidan Gillen’s Roma as he verbally feints and weaves, dazzles and disorients, you would end up paying him for the privilege of keeping those alligators as house-pets.

Gillen’s Roma is the top salesman, which means that he’s winning the contest in which the first prize is a Cadillac, the second steak-knives, and the third and fourth the sack. Behind him comes Matthew Marsh’s thuggish Moss, and behind him Pryce’s Levene, who visibly sweats with grey-faced anxiety as he faces the prospect of doom, and behind him Paul Freeman’s Aaronow, who is too squeamish for the job and exudes the desolation of the American loser. Add Peter McDonald as the aloof, wintry office-manager they all need and hate - and you have a clutch of fine performances of carefully distinguished characters.

So where’s the plot? Well, the key event occurs between Acts One and Two. Two agents fake a break-in into the office and steal the “leads” that, if good, mean introductions to prosperous clients and, if bad, might as well be one-way signs pointing over a cliff. There’s a certain improbability in the solving of this crime, depending as it does on a hardened salesman admitting culpability under too little pressure, but that doesn’t alter the play’s power or Mamet’s point. Arthur Miller once remarked that Willy Loman in “Death of a Salesman” was basically selling himself, and Mamet has said the same about his real-estate piranhas. You feel for the mugs and patsies who credit their patter, but the ultimate victims are themselves.

Mamet has acknowledged that he intends his play to have a cultural or political significance. In the dog-eat-dog world he evokes, the law is strictly Darwinian: succeed and thrive, fail and die. I have only one complaint, which is that Gillen half-drops one of the funniest of many cynical lines: “always tell the truth, it’s easier to remember”. Otherwise, I laughed, winced and shuddered at an American desperation that we go-getting British can’t wholly disown.

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