Theatre
Dealer’s Choice review: ‘male inadequacies laid bare’
Set around a poker table, this play anchors on a painful father-son relationship and shows that the stake are always higher than the amount of cash on the table
April 29, 2025 16:27
Set around a poker table, this play anchors on a painful father-son relationship and shows that the stake are always higher than the amount of cash on the table
April 29, 2025 16:27Play the man not the cards. In Patrick Marber’s 1995 poker play set in a swanky restaurant after closing time, this is the line of dialogue that conveys a devastating truth about the most skillful and dangerous of all card games; that no matter how deadpan the poker face, the character of a player is revealed.
I suspect current or former poker players get the most out of this play. They will fondly recognise the bravado and banter that ricochets between players like a pinball. And it will come as no great surprise to them that what at first appears to be a good-natured weekly ritual between friends is in fact a form of seated combat capable of causing immense harm and pain.
Matthew Dunster’s stylish 30th anniversary revival is proof, if any were needed, that Marber’s first play is timeless. Its action begins in earnest just before restaurant owner Stephen (Daniel Lapaine) sits down with his staff to play their weekly game. He is having one of those excruciating conversations only fathers have with sons about responsibility and thinking. However, really the painful exchange is a complaint by the father that the son is not more like the dad.
What first appears to be a good-natured ritual between friends is in fact a form of seated combat
By the time the first hand is dealt we know that the intimidating man called Ash (Brendan Coyle), who is all too slowly finishing his dinner in the restaurant, is a professional gambler and owed four grand by Stephen’s son Carl (Kasper Hilton-Hille) who plays every week because it is the only way Stephen gets to see his son.
Around this table even waiter Mugsy (Hammed Animashaun) is Stephen’s equal, there being no greater leveller than poker. The group also includes Chef Sweeney (Theo Barklem-Biggs) who, knowing the coming dangers, implores his colleague Frankie (Alfie Allen) to look after 50 quid so Sweeney can still take his five-year-old son out for the day as promised even if he loses his shirt. He does.
The terrific Animashaun goes all in as motor-mouth Mugsy, the all-talk-no-trousers waiter who is tragically committed to opening a restaurant in a disused gents toilet in Bow. Lapaine and Hilton-Hille anchor the evening with a painful portrait of father and son in perpetual conflict. But this game reveals all and it emerges that both are gambling addicts doomed because of their similarities not their differences.
With poker the stakes are always higher than the amount of cash on the table.
Dealer’s Choice
Donmar Warehouse
★★★★
(Photo: Helen Murray)