Latest news with #DonmarTheatre
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.'
New European
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New European
Sweat, the play Donald Trump should watch
Donald Trump may not appreciate theatre, but the central lesson of Sweat is one that he has certainly absorbed, and is now pivotal to his presidency. It goes a long way to explaining his enthusiasm for tariffs and why a significant proportion of voters will be cheering him on, no matter the havoc he has caused on international markets. They feel they have been abandoned, and Trump is here to rescue them. 'Sweat' may not be the most enticing title for a play, but in 2017 it was awarded the Pulitzer prize for drama. Little over a year later, London's Donmar Theatre staged its own production of this mesmerising glimpse of life in America's rust belt. Being one of the lucky few who could get a ticket and squeeze into the tiny Covent Garden theatre, I was indelibly affected by the play's core message. The main characters in Sweat work in a steel factory and are anxious about its future. It makes them nervous about their prospects and wary of outsiders. They provide an eloquent snapshot of the emotions that led to Trump's second term. Promising to bring manufacturing back to the US by loading international competitors with tariffs is a short-term sop to the people who have suffered from globalisation. The message from Sweat is that politicians need to do a great deal more to look after those people who are, for whatever reason, not equipped to prosper in the modern world. And that is the case not just in the US. It seems the UK's position has been to relegate a significant number of these people to a life on benefits, whereas many of them simply need help to find a new sense of purpose. But, while there are still areas of the UK where manufacturing is an important employer, and Trump's tariffs would hit them hard, the much greater hit would come if Trump were to move his attention from exports and trade to the services sector. According to the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics, the trade in goods between the US and UK was close to balancing, with UK sales exceeding purchases by just £2.5bn. (For reasons clear to the statisticians, the US figures include Puerto Rico, but that probably doesn't make a big difference.) However, when it comes to services the UK is, for now, the outright winner. In 2023, UK imports of services from the US were almost the same as those of goods, at £57.4bn. But exports of services from the UK to the US reached a whopping £126.3bn. The City was a major beneficiary. UK-based financial services and businesses are widely used in the US and British spin-doctors are popular across the Pond; PR services are one of the major components in these exports. Putting together trade figures is a complicated exercise, with classification inevitably being as much an art as a science. While Trump sees things only in one dimension, the fact is that a car, for instance, consists of parts and materials accumulated from many different countries. The firms providing services often have branches in several countries and might employ an international team when dealing with a single US-based client. The 10% tariff on goods will be painful, but nowhere near as painful as a similar tariff on services. The squealing from the City would be much louder than anything we have heard so far from manufacturing. Britain's manufacturing base is already quite small, and successive governments have done nothing to address that. Scotch whisky, Welsh lamb and some important pharmaceuticals may be life-enhancing, but they don't add up to self-sufficiency. But even a country with the scale and resources of the US will struggle to get close to the sort of independence in goods that the US president seems to have in mind. Were he to look beyond the headlines – admittedly a big ask – Trump would see that while the US does have an appetite for British cars, it spends far more on pharmaceuticals and chemicals from the UK. Bumping up the cost could be a dangerous move, but that is hardly likely to have featured in any advance planning. For now, the Donald can revel in his power and rejoice in his headlines, but the US public may very quickly realise they are paying a high price for his egotism. Meanwhile, in the interests of preserving the highly paid jobs in the services sector, the UK government must try to humour the toddler tyrant.
New European
26-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New European
Review: You wait ages for a great role for a woman.. in Backstroke, two come at once
The play is essentially a two-hander between Celia Imrie and Tamsin Greig as a mother and daughter trying to navigate a way through dementia and advanced old age. Mackmin also directs a piece that is a well-constructed, very human, and, at once, funny and tragic account of two women who take turns at being the other's carer. It is the job of theatre to just occasionally put up a mirror to real life and that Anna Mackmin achieves rather wonderfully in Backstroke. Imrie in a role that could hardly be any less glamorous – she is hooked up to a drip in a hospital bed for much of the play – is on staggeringly good form, at once pathetic and terrifying in her last moments. Greig delivers a more nuanced performance – cold and heartless at the start but more understandable towards the end – and the chemistry between the two is a joy to behold. There are precious few great roles available for women on the stage, but these two fine actresses, clearly valuing what they have, make the most of them and they make this an unforgettable night at the theatre. Backstroke plays at the Donmar Theatre in London until April 12.
