David Mamet’s satire on Tinseltown greed, need and terminal triviality has its flaws; but it provides two super roles for men able to cope with his brash, breathless dialogue. And last night Jeff Goldblum, playing the head of production at a major studio, and Kevin Spacey, the fixer bringing him a bankable star, didn’t merely rise to the challenge. Nobody with the least interest in acting should miss the snap and crackle, whizz and fizz of, in particular, their opening scene.

Goldblum’s Gould sits in the gloriously eccentric office Ron Howell has designed for the play, a place whose stepladders and sprawled crates reinforce the feel of Hollywood flux. In crashes Spacey’s Fox in a state of excitement going on ecstasy. He skips and hops and, at one point, falls to the floor and does feverish exercises with his fag still in his mouth. And, boy, does he jabber. After all, he’s secured the services of the great Doug Brown for the sort of prison movie that’s been made so often it can’t fail.

Imagine a game of ping-pong played with several balls, some filled with hand-grenades, and you’ve the way Spacey and Goldblum manage a swaggering, streetwise poetry that overlaps, breaks off, explodes. The speed is tremendous: less a run than an Olympic sprint over hurdles, with double-somersaults in between. It’s as expertly acrobatic as the Cirque du Soleil — and funnier than anything their clowns have recently concocted.

Amazingly, it’s also perfectly clear. In his coarse, crazed glee at the prospect of seeing the studio boss the next day, Spacey’s Fox bets Goldblum’s Gould $500 he can’t seduce his temporary secretary, Laura Michelle Kelly’s Karen. That’s a bad mistake.

Gould asks her to come to his house after she has prepared a report on a weird, apocalyptic novel about the benefits of killer-radiation — and she does, with an enthusiasm for the book that changes Gould’s psyche and the prospects for Fox’s film.

Here’s a problem that neither Matthew Warchus’s brilliant production nor Goldblum’s fine performance, which darkens or at least suggests deep shadows behind the glitter, can wholly solve. Would a tough mogul be swayed by the earnest questions put by Kelly’s Karen, even though she seems sweeter and more artless than Madonna, who created the role in 1988? Would he ditch a certain moneyspinner for pretentious gobbledegook because he’s asked if he wants to find a new purity and help the human race?

Surely not; but his Damascus moment doesn’t spoil the proceedings, which resume in top-notch style when Spacey’s Fox returns all bright and bushy-tailed for a morning meeting which he foolishly expects to bring him success and riches. The ensuing row allows Mamet to have a go at several of his trademark targets: the limitations of friendship, the insecurity camouflaged by male joshing, the resentment, anger and desperation just below the surface of a world where money is God and competition the route to his throne.

It’s a row that escalates into chaos, violence and, worse, the everyday awfulness of Hollywood. It’s a town which that accomplished screenwriter and director, David Mamet, knows all too well. But I doubt if even he thought it could be exposed to such scathing, scorching effect as it is here.

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