Dealer’s Choice | ★★★☆☆ | Donmar Warehouse
Anyone who plays poker knows its potential to create stories. It’s a game that’s perfectly in step with our age of individuality, an analogue for capitalism in which – so the myth goes – anyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and a run of bad luck can ruin even the mighty.
I play a semi-regular game and certain hands have begun to take on a mythical quality: the game where I lost with a straight flush to a royal flush, or the time I beat a pair of queens with a seven-deuce bluff, hitting a second pair on the river. What a world! It’s little wonder poker has inspired movies from Casino Royal to Molly’s Game.
Poker was also the subject of Patrick Marber’s debut play, Dealer’s Choice, released in 1995 and now the subject of a 30th anniversary revival at the Donmar. Heavily inspired by David Mamet, this all-male six-hander is a hyper-masculine exploration of compulsion, toxic relationships and the limits of camaraderie. It’s both an ode to and a warning about poker and gambling more generally, clearly written from hard-earned experience (Marber spent his university days hanging about the casinos of Oxford). “A bit like aces, kids. You fall in love with them,” muses one character wistfully.
It’s all set in a London restaurant, where the owner, his gambling addict son and the kitchen staff hold a weekly game in which more money changes hands than any of them can afford. It’s a tale of thwarted ambition: hapless waiter Mugsy dreams of being taken seriously; hotheaded chef Sweeney dreams of being a good dad; KP Frankie dreams of being a professional poker player. Sadly none of them can stop being themselves for long enough to become somebody else.
The first half is fairly lighthearted, filled with the kind of blokey banter that’s beginning to flag Dealer’s Choice as the 1990s period drama it is. Wannabe hustler Mugsy gets all the best lines, some of them clearly inspired by Marber’s hero Pinter, and Hammed Animashaun delivers them with bags of bumbling charm. The balance is a little uneven, though, with other characters relatively underwritten. The second half is set around the game itself, where the equilibrium is upset by the arrival of Ash, a stranger who knows more than he’s letting on. It looks fantastic, with a rotating poker table and dramatic lighting but it plays out pretty much as you imagine, all macho outbursts and bitter recriminations.
It’s never less than entertaining and it’s interesting to see how the material has aged over the decades but Dealer’s Choice never quite escapes itself, feeling like a proficient debut that’s a little too in thrall to its lofty influences.
