Dealer's Choice: 30 years on, Patrick Marber's portrait of male madness still hits home

Telegraph

29-04-2025

'Play the man, not the cards' says Mugsy, a waiter who dreams of opening his own restaurant in Patrick Marber's 1995 debut about a group of men who meet every Sunday night to play poker. Yet with every member of this combustible group as good at deceiving themselves as they are each other, it's the game of bluff taking place within their own natures that provide the highest stakes, in this classic study of men addicted to risking week after week everything they have.
Marber is best known for his 1997 chamber piece Closer, which applied the ruthlessly transactional nature of late-era Conservatism to the treacherous entanglements between two couples. Yet Dealer's Choice is arguably the better play, partly because although it too nods to the wheeler-dealer cut and thrust of the mid 1990s through the various alpha male delusions of its six male protagonists, it feels less tied to a particular era.
Matthew Dunster's 30th-anniversary revival tacitly acknowledges this – in the dimly lit makeshift poker parlour in the basement of Stephen's restaurant where Stephen and his drifter son Carl, Sweeney, Frankie and Mugsy, plus newcomer Ash gather after closing time, we could be at almost any point in the past 30 years. Three decades on, Marber's brutal comedy remains a masterclass portrait of lonely little men wishing themselves into being better people than they are.
Dunster's muscular production gives full reign to Marber's blokey banter and apparently off-the-cuff wit. Backstage at the restaurant, chef Sweeney and the waiter Frankie – Alfie Allen, looking and sounding like a young Michael Caine – square up to each other like squabbling puppies. Humour is both armour and a means of macho myth-making. Dreams and denial hang in the air like cigarette smoke, or would do if the uptight fastidious Stephen, who prizes discipline above all else, allowed smoking anywhere in his joint.
The divorced Sweeney is determined to keep 50 quid back from the game so he can take out his five-year-old daughter for the day; it's no flaw of the play that we know this won't happen. Stephen, for his part, savagely berates his loser son over his lack of focus and losses at poker; it doesn't take an armchair psychologist to intuit that his loathing for his son's weaknesses is a displacement for his own compulsions. Young, hapless Carl, in an affecting, hollow-eyed performance from Kasper Hilton-Hille, just wants his dad to stop shouting at him.
All the same, Dunster's production never quite plays a winning hand. There's a blunted, on-the-nose quality to it that sometimes stands apart from the play's steelier heart – this is, after all, a drama that refuses to countenance redemption. Both Sweeney and Frankie are also too quick to reveal their frustrations – a failure in the writing perhaps, but not resolved here through performance.
Yet Brendan Coyle lends a winningly controlled inscrutability to Ash while Hammed Animashaun, a blissfully funny actor, is pure joy as Mugsy, the somewhat dim but still irrepressible waiter who can't understand why no one else thinks an oriental restaurant called Bow Thai in a former public convenience off the Mile End Road is an excellent investment opportunity. He's the butt of everyone's jokes, but in the end perhaps the only winner. Not that Marber allows for any real winners in a game that next week will simply play out all over again.