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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.'
The Independent
21-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Celia Imrie and Tamsin Greig play a mother and daughter through the ages in the bittersweet Backstroke
'Swimming pools do have a Pavlovian effect on people's bladders,' Celia Imrie chuckles to a not quite six-year-old Tamsin Greig, as the two actors float about an imaginary pool in the intimate space of the Donmar Warehouse. The Donmar presents the world premiere of Anna Mackmin's semi-autobiographical play about motherhood, circling a contentious and reversed parent-child relationship through the ages. Bo, played by sitcom star Greig, rushes to her mother's hospital side amid her dementia diagnosis and a series of strokes. Doyenne of stage and screen, Imrie plays Beth as a hippie Miss Havisham, with half-grey, half-pink hair and bohemian flares riddled with holes. Through a scattershot mix of pre-taped and performed memories, we learn how this topsy-turvy relationship came to be, with Greig playing Bo in memories that go back as far as when she is six years old. Beth, meanwhile, is fabulously bohemian, with a narcissistic, anxiously attached nature that fosters both a passionate child and a cynical adult in her daughter. Beth's preoccupation with her own liberation leaves Bo without the time or space to be a child. For the first 20 minutes of Backstroke, Greig paces about the hospital room where Imrie's character lies catatonic, nervously clashing with the supporting cast of nurses and doctors – and desperately wanting for a scene partner. To everyone's delight, finally Imrie springs to life, leaping from her vegetative state to their recreated kitchen table, cigarette in hand, feet up, suddenly regaling her daughter with stories of her sexual escapades in blush-worthy detail. The stage, cluttered with hospital paraphernalia and kitchen parts, acts as a nifty portal for characters to jump through their memories. Designed by Lez Brotherston right down to the cigarette-stained Seventies linoleum flooring, the set evokes claustrophobia – forcing the actors into tight proxemics to squeeze the vulnerability and tension from them, all the while making audiences feel the familiar strain of staying one too many days back home during Christmas break. Imrie delivers her colourful dialogue with devilish delight, even if at times she does seem to be grasping for lines. Her airy, elongated register contrasts Greig's punchy groundedness wonderfully. Beth's witty musings – 'I think poetry is simply list-making masquerading as art' – are undercut by crude barbs, such as when she compares her daughter's mouth to a cat's arse. Mackmin's script feels real. The characters are lived-in, no doubt lifted from the writer's own memory bank. The writer and director of the play grew up in a Norfolk hippie commune with her poet father and bohemian mother, who died following an Alzheimer's diagnosis. Memories intrude in tough times, and the play attempts to reflect this with videos projected onto the Donmar's back wall. As a concept, it is appealing, but in practice the heavily filtered visuals and edited audio verge on melodramatic, pulling audiences out of the story. Greig's performance in the second act anchors Backstroke. In between the duo's crackling chemistry, it's the moments of stillness on her face that capture the universal pain of missing someone before they're gone. Her ability to shift from sassy rebuttals to her mother's critiques of her weight, age and fertility, to tenderly wiping her mother's mouth as she lays dormant is gut-wrenching. Towards the end, throats thicken, and breaths begin to shake in the audience – before a scene change and well-timed gag bring on sensible British coughs and sniffs of emotional sobering up. For those familiar with dementia's toll, this play will ruin you. Others may find it lacks a certain, well, certainty. Is it about the innate knottiness of mother-daughter relationships? The value of memory? The pain of loss? It never quite seems to know.
The Guardian
18-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Why aren't there Oscars for what we do?' Choreographer Ellen Kane lets rip
Ellen Kane is on a roll. When we speak, the choreographer and movement director has two shows running, Ballet Shoes at the National Theatre, and Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 at the Donmar. She has just finished Why Am I So Single?, the follow-up from the writers of Six, the smash hit about Henry VIII's wives, and she's in rehearsals for the revival of Dear England, James Graham's funny and stirring depiction of Gareth Southgate's tenure as England manager. If you watched all those shows in a row, you would have no idea the same person had a hand in them all, such is the art of the movement director, a job that many may not even realise exists. But it's an essential one. 'Outside actually directing a scene, everything that moves on the stage is usually done by me,' says Kane, chatting backstage at the National. That means any dance, obviously, but also scene transitions, characters getting from A to B, and working with actors on how they connect with the audience. She helps make visible a character's emotional experience. 'So that we, the audience, can feel it,' she says. 'I love to feel. I can watch something and appreciate it, 'Oh that's beautiful.' But do I leave moved?' What is striking about those shows is how caught up audiences are in their energy – and part of Kane's job is to shape that energetic arc, to make sitting in the theatre a visceral experience, as well as an intellectual one. In Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 the characters are at crisis point, tackling love, infidelity and the meaning of life. 'Huge topics of human existence,' says Kane, 'so the vibration of the person dealing with those things is large, right? We're not just going to tell you about it, because that's not how we live those experiences.' She doesn't work by giving the performers exercises or moves to do, but by dissecting the text. 'I adore finding the right energy for each beat, the sharp turns and corners you can take.' On Dear England, one daunting job was to help actors morph into well-known footballers. Kane didn't work much with Joseph Fiennes on his impressive Gareth Southgate. 'Joe did that himself,' she says (Gwilym Lee will take on the mantle in the revival). But to hone the squad – Harry Kane, Harry Maguire, Marcus Rashford et al – she and co-movement director Hannes Langolf studied hours and hours of footage of the players, analysing mannerisms and tics. She brought in footballer Lee Dixon to teach them about penalties, drills and formations, and absorbed all of that into the show, generating the spirit of a match without ever passing a ball. 'Rupert Goold, the director, is a huge fan of football and he said, 'Let's bring in the ball.' And I was like, 'Ooh, that's so dodge!'' She laughs and cringes. 'Because you'll never replicate the real thing. If there's no ball, all they can feel is the tension in the situation, and our job is to heighten the tension.' Choreography in theatre and film is an underappreciated art. Alongside movement director Polly Bennett, Kane is working with Equity to set up a choreographers' network and tackle their low profile in the industry. 'You know,' she says, 'why aren't there Oscars for choreography? Why aren't there Baftas? Why aren't we being credited?' Kane's work on the film of Matilda the Musical is all over social media, for example (sample comments: 'The choreography for Matilda is AMAZING'; 'THIS MUSICAL WAS TOO SICK YALL GOTTA WATCH IT'), but her name is rarely attached. They are wrangling with IMDb over getting a proper credit on films, rather than being lost among the 'additional crew' at the bottom of the page. Not that Kane is out for glory. She's just passionate about what she does, even if she never really planned this career. Growing up in (pre-gentrification) Hackney, London, there was the odd after-school dance class and a randomly chosen dance GCSE, but when dancers from Lewisham College came to perform at her school, she recalls: 'I was just so moved by it. I was, like, 'I've got to do that!'' She went to Lewisham, which in the 1990s ran an inspiring dance course, full of late starters who'd never done a ballet class, many of whom have gone on to influential careers. That course is no more, and Kane laments that the decimation of the arts in schools will leave no pathway for others like her to get into the industry. 'There are not many working-class people at this level. Now there will be even fewer. How do we get there if there is no exposure, no access?' You can't argue it's a superfluous subject, she says. 'Dance changed the trajectory of my life. It has to be valid.' When she went into dance training, Kane was adamant she would never do musical theatre. She performed contemporary dance with Richard Alston's company and others. But she began choreographing as assistant to Peter Darling on Billy Elliot, and now at 50 she's really hitting her stride, with two big musicals coming up, Nanny McPhee and Paddington. 'I'm just loving my life,' she says, 'and grateful that I'm given the opportunity to make these stories come alive.' Ballet Shoes is at the National Theatre, London, until 22 February; Dear England, is at the same venue, 10 March-24 May.
