Latest news with #Dealer'sChoice
Time Out
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Dealer's Choice
Patrick Marber's reputation as a playwright was sealed with 1997's Closer, but wowee his debut Dealer's Choice is good. '1995' screams a giant projection at the start of Matthew Dunster's production. It's a fun gesture but it does not foreshadow a nostalgia fest. It's actually a remarkably prescient play - a mobile phone is showcased prominently and there's a whole bit in it about the gentrification of Bow. One running joke about how Hammed Animashaun's hapless Mugsy wants to turn a disused public toilet into a restaurant sent chills down my spine (I live in Beckenham where we have literally turned the old public loos into a cafe). Above all, it is a play about men, under pressure, playing poker. If anything truly does date it to its era it's that the fizz and crackle of Marber's lads-only dialogue recalls the Brit gangster films of the time (although it does actually predate most of them). Regardless, it's a lean and thrilling beast, that centres on a group of blokes who work in the restaurant in which the after hours poker games are played. The first half is all set up, as we're introduced to the ensemble. Alfie Allen – brother to Dunster's regular muse Lily – was kind of billed as the star, but really the show belongs to Animishawn's ebullient Mugsy. His toilet-centric dreams are mocked by all and sundry, but really he's the only one who feels like he might be able to move on from the gambling. At the start of the story Theo Barklem-Biggs's deadpan chef Sweeney protests that no, he's not going to play a late night poker game hours before being granted a visit with his daughter; it's obvious what will happen. Posh restaurant owner Stephen (Daniel Lapaine) needs the game for myriad reasons – to vent his demons, to validate his uninspiring eatery, to give him an excuse to see his son Carl (Kasper Hilton-Hille). Allen's fey, rootless Frankie says he wants to move to Vegas and become a professional gambler, but is that really escaping this room or doubling down on it? And Carl has fallen into gambling debt, trying to piggy back on Mugsy's toilet scheme to con a couple of grand out of his dad; now the man he owes money to – Brendan Coyle's Ash – has come to collect. The first half of Marber's script sets it all up beautifully. Then, following what I can only describe as a supremely cunty change in Moi Tran's set that moves us from restaurant to basement with maximum ostentatiousness, it's time for the games. Nobody depicts blokes on stage quite like Dunster, who is pretty much the Guy Ritchie of theatre directors. It can sometimes cause problems with subtler fare, but he's in his element with this grimy thriller, getting the best out of his cast for what is, ultimately, an enjoyable story of terrible male desperation. We feel the stakes of the games, but we also recognise the hopelessness of most of these men's situations - nothing is going to free them from the cages they've built for themselves. But that's why Animishawn's Mugsy is so delightful. He's an idiot, but he's a beautiful idiot, a big happy puppy with big (well, toilet-sized) dreams who sails through life unfettered by the mind-forged manacles that hold the others back. Later on, Stephen surreptitiously does him a massive favour, and you sense that it's not out of pity for Muggsy, but because there's still hope for him.
The Guardian
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Dealer's Choice review – Hammed Animashaun is the ace in a busted flush
In 1995, two British playwrights made their debuts with all-male, six-character chamber-pieces strongly influenced by Pinter and Mamet, and set over one long, tense night in London. Jez Butterworth's Mojo and Patrick Marber's Dealer's Choice proved to be superficially dazzling calling cards rather than enduring classics. Now a pallid 30th-anniversary revival of the latter reveals its weaknesses. Set in a restaurant where the manager Stephen (the Paul Bettany-esque Daniel Lapaine) and his employees Frankie (Alfie Allen), Sweeney (Theo Barklem-Biggs) and Mugsy (Hammed Animashaun) are gearing up for a late-night card game, the play brims with bants. Mentions of the National Lottery, which was only a few months old when the play premiered, hint at an incoming gambling epidemic. There are even period-correct beer labels, though credulity is stretched when someone repeatedly gets phone reception in a basement. It is when the writing veers away from jokes and jibes that the play sags irredeemably. Two-thirds of the characters have no inner life, and half are prone to sudden outbursts which resemble artificial attempts to raise the stakes. That almost succeeds when Stephen discovers that his son Carl (Kasper Hilton-Hille) has been gambling with Ash (Brendan Coyle), a rival patriarch, and reacts like a spurned lover. But the absence of peril and gravitas in Matthew Dunster's staging, and in his conception of character, is total. Ash is defeated rather than dangerous. Carl, a slot-machine addict, is about as troubled as Doogie Howser MD. The card games are fatally boring. There are compensations. In Moi Tran's design, the restaurant is dominated by a pebbledash wall the colour of dried blood, which hints at the premises' butcher-shop origins. A spectacular piece of engineering makes us feel as if we are descending into the basement for the second act. This is eclipsed by the most special effect of all: Animashaun, an exuberantly geezerish geyser of charm, toweringly tall and quarterback-shouldered but with a dancer's grace. It is fitting in a play about competitive masculinity that a single performer should emerge victorious, but the contest isn't even close: this is practically a one-man show. 'You've lost the plot,' someone tells Mugsy. 'I am the plot,' he snaps back. Hear, hear. At Donmar Warehouse, London, until 7 June
Telegraph
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Dealer's Choice: 30 years on, Patrick Marber's portrait of male madness still hits home
'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.
Evening Standard
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Evening Standard
Dealer's Choice at the Donmar Warehouse review: savagely comic study of blokes playing poker
Dealer's Choice seemed to come out of nowhere in 1995. Marber was a former standup best known as a writer and performer on news spoofs On the Hour and The Day Today: suddenly, he had a play on at the National Theatre. The script showcased the sharp observation he's since honed as a playwright, screenwriter and director. It also drew on his experience of gambling while at Oxford.
The Independent
18-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Alfie Allen on Dealer's Choice: ‘Maybe when it was written, men would just bury things and move on'
Play the man, not the cards.' It's a credo that goes to the heart of the game of poker – and it's central to Patrick Marber 's 1995 play Dealer's Choice, which is being revived at London's Donmar Theatre this month. Poker is a simple game of statistical probability, but also a complex mesh of psychology and personality, and no one wins by relying on maths alone. In poker, the harder someone tries to make themselves unreadable, the more likely they are to show everything. It's this sense of enigma that is at the heart of so many of Alfie Allen 's performances, which, in recent years, have encompassed a Tony-nominated turn on Broadway, primetime BBC dramas and acclaimed film roles. There's a sense of self-containment but also of still waters running deep. It's no surprise that the play's producers have cast Allen as Frankie, considered the best poker player among the friends who play a weekly game together in what was Marber's debut. Having caught the laddish zeitgeist in its year of release, Dealer's Choice has proved endlessly revivable; it's knotty and complex enough to plausibly return and make sense in any number of different eras and contexts. It centres around a group of men – all working in the same restaurant, all struggling with thwarted dreams and all hoping, slightly desperately for something better. They're united by their poker games; a realm in which they can take responsibility and simultaneously surrender it. In common with many of the cast members, Allen had never played poker before rehearsals for the play began. But their first revelation was the most important. 'We learnt that there's got to be something on the line for it to matter,' he says. 'We were all just betting with fake chips, but we realised that it doesn't really mean anything unless you're playing with your own money. And as an actor, that's definitely at the core of what I try and figure out about every part I play: what's at stake? There are the obvious things that are at stake in terms of money but you try and dig a little deeper.' In its Donmar incarnation, the play sits comfortably within the current discourse around masculinity. Allen's Frankie is a cocky but slightly brittle young alpha-male. He's not only the best poker player in the group but a prolific ladies' man to boot. Is there, though, slightly less to him than meets the eye? As the group bickers over the cards, all of them end up unconsciously revealing slightly more about themselves than they'd like. This is probably not a trait that can ever be applied to Alfie Allen in person. There's never any danger of him overplaying his hand. When we meet in the Donmar's Covent Garden offices, he's unfailingly affable despite a long day of rehearsals – a process he seems to be enjoying every bit as much as the actual prospect of performance. He's sympathetic and amused rather than irritable when my recording device malfunctions and generous with his time. And yet there's a slight sense of guardedness about him. And really, that's not too surprising. As the son of famously garrulous and unguarded actor, presenter, comic and general overlord of Eighties and Nineties excess, Keith Allen, Alfie learnt about the pleasures and perils of the limelight at a young age. The success – and tabloid-related travails – of his singer-sister Lily presumably drove the point home. Questions about his family elicit lengthy pauses and not much more. You suspect he's not so much unwilling to talk about them as slightly sick of the questions. 'My family is my family, you know?' he says. What, you suspect, does animate him is his work, which is increasingly both varied and impressive. Dealer's Choice captures the robust, often combative nuances of male friendship brilliantly. 'That's sometimes how a strong friendship is built,' as Allen puts it. 'You can go to the extremes and then kind of go back to 'actually, we're alright aren't we?' He's also modest enough to give Marber most of the credit for this. 'Patrick's writing really does the work for you in that respect,' he says. 'There are no big, performative monologues in this. It's always about what the other person is doing. That's how it becomes a proper dance.' But it takes two to tango. And more and more, it seems Allen is building a portfolio of vulnerable men in extremis. Alongside Frankie, there's his wracked, tormented Theon Greyjoy in Game of Thrones ('an amazing, crazy 10 years of my life… that took me to places I didn't think I could go'). The torture of Theon in the show pivoted around castration, emasculation and humiliation. Last year, Allen played the title role in McVeigh, a timely exploration of America's deadliest domestic terrorist, Timothy McVeigh, who perpetrated the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, killing 167 people, including 19 children. And in 2022, there was Steven Knight's SAS: Rogue Heroes in which he played another real-life character, Jock Lewes, the founding principal training officer of the regiment and a man who combined extreme personal discipline with a maverick streak of wildness. In realising his screen version of Lewes, Allen did something very characteristic. He offered up a performance that was expressive while being entirely without ego. 'I didn't want to veer too far from the version of him I'd read about – I just looked at the love letters that he wrote to his wife-to-be,' he says. 'There's a whole book of them and that was my source material. I didn't really want to jazz it up or put my spin on it – I wanted to stay true to what the real life version was'. It's tempting here to make a comparison to Alfie's father Keith, who, for all of his charisma (in fact, probably, because of it), seems to essentially play Keith Allen in every role. Alfie Allen was famously raised in the public eye – Lily has spoken of evenings where the siblings were left upstairs at the Groucho Club while their dad enjoyed himself in the bar downstairs – and has explored the party animal lifestyle himself. But there's something else in a character like Jock Lewes; a sense of ingrained self-denial that feels like a revealingly antithetical response to this. 'Jock was an aloof disciplinarian,' Allen says. 'He was raised in a Protestant household, so maybe [the SAS] was his outlet. It gave him a way of channelling his need for structure.' Could something similar be said of Allen himself – and in particular, his ability to disappear into character? Like the culture itself, it feels like Allen has come a long way. He and Theo Barklem-Biggs (fellow SAS Rogue Hero and one of his co-stars in Dealer's Choice) set up a therapeutic forum for the cast and crew while on set in Morocco. 'There was a bunch of people who didn't know each other, all plonked in the middle of the desert,' Allen explains. 'Which is a bit like what it would be like in the army I guess! It was really good to have that kind of outlet, where everyone felt they could sit around and speak to each other.' For the duration of the run at the Donmar, he and Barklem-Biggs are sharing a flat in central London – there's a sense of intimacy and honesty, both in and out of character. So when Allen talks about what's at stake in the context of Dealer's Choice, it's clear that he's talking about more than money. Dealer's Choice, like most of the actor's recent parts, is about how men talk to each other – and in some cases, what happens when they don't. But have things moved on since the play was first staged? 'I guess they have in terms of talking about love and intimacy and mental health,' he says. 'Obviously, I was only eight or nine in 1995 so it wasn't all that evident to me then but in terms of things being better now, maybe then there was just a kind of unspoken understanding… that sometimes men would just bury things and move on. Whereas now, I think we feel more free to build on that and talk.' In terms of playing the man and not the cards, it feels like Dealer's Choice – and Alfie Allen himself – has found itself in tune with another cultural moment. He might not be a born gambler. But he certainly isn't playing it safe either. He'd almost certainly be an excellent poker player, I suggest. 'I'd like to think I could be a good bluffer,' he replies. 'But it's all about knowing when to bet.'
