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The stakes are stacked high in this addictive poker drama
DEALER’S CHOISE
Trafalgar Studios
DEALER’S Choice was conceived back in the early 1990s when writer Patrick Marber was cutting his teeth at The Vic casino in Edgware Road.
Marber’s meteoric rise – winning coveted awards for Notes on a Scandal and Don Juan in Soho – has been almost as explosive as the unprecedented boom in the poker industry.
When his poker play was first staged at the National Theatre in 1995, a mere 220 started in the World Series of Poker in Vegas – this year there were 9,000.
The pandemic has swept this country like a bad bout of bird flu and, as a recovering addict, the descent into depravity experienced by the characters in this superb play were painfully familiar.
The action starts in a restaurant with the dreamer Mugsy (Stephen Wight) keen to persuade the chef Sweeney (Ross Boatman) to play in tonight’s game.
Mugsy’s gambling fix will be cancelled if young dad Sweeney does not play. Acutely aggravated, Mugsy’s bulging and craving eyes reminded me of the vampish junkies marauding through Camden Town. If religion is the opium of the people, poker is gambler’s crack cocaine.
Under duress of the restaurant owner Stephen (Malcolm Sinclair), the game’s organiser who insists on anal house rules and painstakingly chronicles each result, Sweeney caves in and the game goes ahead.
Card shark Ash (Roger Lloyd Pack), who gambles for a living and is chasing up a £4,000 poker debt from the restaurant-owner’s son, enters the cauldron to great effect.
His deadpan exchange with the uptight Stephen, about a cold steak, had me in stitches and Pack was brilliant throughout. This is an extremely funny night, with witty dialogue masterfully directed by the rising star Sam West.
But for all the laughs there is a darker message.
Humiliation, dehumanisation, and ruin awaits the characters in the restaurant basement.
Male egos collide in a highly charged atmosphere. Hard-earned wages, which means so much to the players the morning after, are staked with fearful flippancy.
Mugsy says the game is worthless unless the stakes “mean something”. But in the world of the gambler “profit” is not simply gauged in monetary terms, as we see.
Despite all the odds and logic to the games, the gambler exists in the underbelly of rational thought. And there is something desirable, and ultimately addictive in that.
Dealer’s Choice is an erudite probe into a modern-day phenomenon that is bang on the money and comes highly recommended.
Until March 2008
CNJ Booking line 0870 040 0070 |
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