If a woman says, “Oh, so when your period cramps get really bad, you also sweat all over? I thought I was the only one!” to another woman, this is probably how sisterhood can be formed and displayed. But when it comes to men’s brotherhood in pain and struggle, what do we see? Red Dead Redemption 2 might be an excellent example revealing homosocial intimacy, but playwright Patrick Marber might argue that such intimacy is just an illusion.
Matthew Dunster’s revival of Marber’s 1995 play at the Donmar Warehouse perfectly captures such a sense of illusion. In Dealer’s Choice, there is no solidarity between men like Arthur and Charles in RDR2, but rather a bunch of failed gamblers who gather every Sunday night for a poker game in the basement of a London restaurant, bluffing not just cards, but their manhood.
Under the disguise of male friendship, we see the restaurant cook Sweeney (Theo Barklem-Biggs), a mediocre middle-class man trying to perform as a role model father, yet still choosing the poker table over his five-year-old daughter. His colleagues Frankie (Alfie Allen) and Mugsy (Hammed Animashaun) are no better. Frankie, the smooth-talking waiter, eventually finds himself thoroughly outplayed, and the small dreamer Mugsy, fantasising about opening his own posh restaurant in Mile End, clings to an illusory hope of luck. He only wins seven quid, but even that is just out of his boss Stephen’s (Daniel Lapaine) benevolent deception.
Marber’s writing stands somewhere between realism and allegorical abstractionism, and Moi Tran’s design precisely captures such in-betweenness through industrial abstraction. The first half of the play features a detailed kitchen in an uncannily dislocated restaurant, easily evoking a Kafkaesque environment always set in the middle of nowhere. In the second half, we are magically transported to the poker underworld, where a constantly orbiting poker table occupies the central stage – trapping those men in a space which is eerily recognisable but ultimately unable to escape.
The emotional hallmark of Dealer’s Choice is the toxic generational bond between Stephen and his son, Carl (Kasper Hilton-Hille). While the restaurant owner Stephen uses the poker game as his primary means of bonding (and controlling) his son, Carl seeks false rebellious autonomy through gambling with another deceptive “fatherly” figure Ash – the ultimate symbol of this game, those failed men, and the illusory bonds they cling to.
From a more naturalistic perspective, these men’s backstories and motives feel psychologically thin and less fleshed-out, more like dramatized behavioural patterns rather than individuals with inner cries and emotional truthfulness. However, the cast mends much of it. Barklem-Biggs captures the tender toughness of Sweeney, the cook-father figure who wants to project quiet strength but wilts into cowardliness and awkwardness when confronting Stephen and Ash. Hammed Animashaun brings comic relief as Mugsy, though his exaggerated physicality sometimes feels out of context and less proper – perhaps it’s also part of Marber’s allegorical absurdity.
Hilton-Hille and Lapaine make the toxic father-son dynamic painfully convincing – full of resentment, hatred and mutual torture, yet unable to leave each other. Allen sharply depicts Frankie’s trivial street wits, while Coyle successfully manoeuvres this endgame figure’s cold ruthlessness with his chilling restraint, always silent and emotionally detached.
Some might be pushed away by the absence of women in Dealer’s Choice, but this is exactly the message, even the whole point – men need to learn how to fix themselves without women. They can’t always rely on women’s salvation complex.
Listings and ticket information can be found here.
