There has been considerable media hype about Rose Byrne’s return to the Sydney stage in the STC’s new production of David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow. When she does finally appear, as Karen, the somewhat gormless temporary secretary to the newly promoted movie executive Bobby Gould (Damon Herriman), she is a delight. But it is Damon Herriman who is the real star of this production.

Speed-the-Plow is a three-person, three-act satire of Hollywood and the ‘movie business’. Lachy Hume puts in a fine performance as Charlie Fox, the underling who brings Bobby the opportunity to make a blockbuster film that will make them both rich, perhaps even equals in this cut-throat macho business. At the centre of the play is the intense relationship between these two men, a longstanding friendship sustained, it would appear, by little more than ambition and co-dependency.