POCKET-PICKING.

"All classes are criminal, we live in an age of equality": Joe Orton's subversive mot came to mind as I listened to the craven upper-middle-class palaver of Harley Granville-Barker's 1905 play "The Voysey Inheritance" (directed by David Warren, at the Atlantic Theatre Company, in a muscular adaptation by David Mamet). Granville-Barker, who was an actor and director as well as a playwright, was largely responsible for staging the productions that established George Bernard Shaw's popularity in Britain; his own well-constructed plays display the influence of Shaw's early dialectical and social-realist affinities. For this story, set in the mahogany library of the Voysey family's luxurious country house, Granville-Barker turns the notion of property-as-theft into what the Edwardians would have called a ripping yarn. As it turns out, every stick of upholstered furniture, every scrap of fine food, every charmed detail in the affluent Voysey tableau is built on fraud--a scam perpetuated over two generations by successive heads of the family's distinguished law firm--until Edward Voysey (Michael Stuhlbarg), the dour, dutiful son of the current scion, uncovers accounting irregularities in his father's books and confronts him. "The firm is bankrupt," Edward says to the beloved, ailing paterfamilias. "What have you done with the money?"

"The Voysey Inheritance" returns Mamet, whose "American Buffalo" and "Glengarry Glen Ross" are two of the finest plays about the spiritual attrition of American capitalism, to his favorite subject: business. "You know what is free enterprise?" Teach, the punk in "American Buffalo" who plots to steal a valuable coin collection, says. "The Freedom Of the Individual . . . to Embark on Any Fucking Course that he sees fit . . . In order to secure his honest chance to make a profit." In "The Voysey Inheritance," theft is of a more refined sort, and rapacity is hidden beneath a veneer of respectability. But, if Mamet writes with his pinkie finger up, he is nonetheless mining his familiar dark-comic mother lode of barbarity disguised as practicality. In order to protect the family fortune, Mr. Voysey (the urbane Fritz Weaver) has, unbeknownst to his clients, siphoned off capital from their trust funds and estates into his own account, from which he doles out interest, so that the customers never know they've been bilked. The strategy is a form of gambling; in this game of catch-up, the father bets that he can outperform the market, filling his own pockets while replacing what he has stolen.

To Edward, the discovery is a cataclysm. "We have defrauded everyone who has trusted us," he says. Rather like a con man explaining the art of three-card monte--"Business nowadays is a confidence trick," Mr. Voysey says in the original version--the father coolly takes his scandalized son through the accounts, a house of cards that has grown ever higher on his thirty-year watch. The fraud was what Mr. Voysey calls "my inheritance." "I'd hoped it wasn't to be yours," he says, while rationalizing the crime as a heroic attempt to protect both the firm and the family's name. "We do what we must in this world," he says. "Was I to see my father ruined and disgraced without lifting a finger to help him? . . . Not to mention the interest of the clients." Against Mr. Voysey's slick defensive sophistry, the play pits Edward's clear-eyed staunchness. To him, two wrongs don't make a right. The scene builds artfully, until the jejune Edward finds himself boxed in by his father's revelations. "You're my partner, and my son," Mr. Voysey tells him. "And you'll inherit the business."

In collapsing a five-act play into two, Mamet has shrunk the original struggle between father and son, especially the swaggering of Mr. Voysey, styled by Granville-Barker as a bit of a "buccaneer" who browbeats his timid, self-conscious son for his lack of business acumen ("You're about as fit for this job as a babe unborne") and for his bookish interest in philosophy ("Your ethics of this and your ethics of that, the sort of garden oats which men seem to sow nowadays"). By cutting back the family politics and making Edward a blunt, stalwart terrier from the beginning, Mamet substitutes ...