Dealer's Choice, Donmar Warehouse review - fresh take on a classic about male self-destruction

Patrick Marber’s powerful debut about gambling men is 30 years old, born as the Eighties entrepreneurial boom was starting to sour but before poker become a game for mathematical whizz kids. What it reveals as it maps the male psyche seems as pertinent as ever. 

Into the gladiatorial arena of a weekly poker game among restaurant colleagues comes a (disguised) pro player, and the results are explosive. There are no women here, which is the point. Their disapproving tongues aren’t needed as the combatants are perfectly adept at skewering themselves. These are men who have mistaken risk-taking for courage, addiction for passion.

The setting is an aspirational restaurant somewhere, we assume, in central London. In these men’s universe, the Mile End Road is outlaw country, a hostile environment. Yet this is where young waiter Mugsy (Hammed Animashaun, pictured bottom) has his eye on developing a new restaurant – which, despite being underground in a converted public convenience, will be a well classy joint, he proclaims, “French. Or Italian”. As a publicity stunt, he considers making it teetotal as well. 

The casting of Animashaun is a stroke of genius, as he is a key element in transforming the play from an acrid ritual of humiliation for sad-sack white-working-class Mugsy into a tale of survival, where a ballsy Black guy shadow-boxes on to fight another day. Somehow, Animashaun's robust physicality helps undercut his status as a loser. His Mugsy is still a deluded mug, but the affection for him among his colleagues is palpable. These are the same qualities he brought to Bottom at the Bridge, along with the kind of comic timing and deadpan reactions you can’t teach. He brought the house down every night at the Barbican when he and Nigel Lindsay (the first Mugsy, at the National) played the mobsters brushing up their Shakespeare in Kiss Me Kate.

The second key element is the casting of Daniel Lapaine (pictured left) as Stephen, the owner of the joint, who has reluctantly had to bankroll his febrile son Carl (Kasper Hilton-Hille), a gambling addict secretly and steadily driving himself to financial ruin, and worse. Stephen here becomes an increasingly focal point, and Lapaine delivers him as both the stereotypical posh capitalist he might seem to be to his staff and the heartbreaking dad we see is trying to protect his wayward son while coping with his own passion for gambling. It's a performance of great depth and dexterity.

Stirring the pot is the menacing presence of Brendan Coyle (pictured below, right) as Ash, the aptly named pro poker player, his surname suggestive of his sad, death-bound existence carving out a living among low-lifes. He is the surrogate father who has been coaching hollow-cheeked Carl towards the same destination, although, of the two, Ash has the stronger grip on notions of honour and decency. The climactic scene where he and Stephen go mano a mano is raw and unsettling. 

There are also strong performances from the other two cast members, Alfie Allen as Frankie the sous chef, a smart-arse ladies’ man whose pleasantries are stripped away in extremis to reveal a red-hot angry man; and Theo Barklem-BIggs as Sweeney, the divorced chef battling to see his child in between long stints over a hot pro cooking range, all fully functioning on the little Donmar stage. The level of banter within the brigade is strikingly high, the language ripe, though comically gifted. (My favourite insult: “You nipple”.)

Mugsy, we realise, is trying to lift himself out of the trough he sees his co-workers in, a man whose mantra is “vision”, even if his eyesight is wonky. He’s terrier-like in trying to drum up investors, and his naivety can be extremely funny – about an absent poker-player who has had to go to a funeral he asks: “Is there a history of death in his family?” – but he is a small child in a world of ground-down grown-ups.

For the second half, the action moves down into the restaurant’s basement, where Stephen has laid out the impeccably ironed green baize for the table top. (At the start, Mugsy sings a snatch from Guys and Dolls’ ‘Luck Be a Lady’, to remind us of theatre’s ultimate basement game.) For this, the set suddenly rises to reveal the room below, a design coup courtesy of Moi Tan. In the first half, though, the kitchen and the restaurant floor have to share the space, with lighting alternating between the two. This mostly works as a nifty way to maximise the small Donmar stage, though at one point it leaves Ash oddly sitting alone at his table for a protracted period, as the main focus moves to the workers behind him.But overall this is an ideally paced and presented production, the game moving through the small hours via blackouts, the name of each round projected onto the wall behind. It’s this series of scenes that shows Marber’s writing at its most brilliant, delving into the intricacies of poker (he was a serious player in his twenties) yet making them work for a non-playing audience. When the tension that has been building is finally, cataclysmically released, it’s a relief, though the reckoning is moving and melancholy.

Above all, director Matthew Dunster never loses sight of the resonant title of the play. It's a metaphor that stands for both the strength and the vulnerability of the gamblers, who can dictate the nature of the round, yet ultimately have to live within the bounds it sets them, as in life they are hemmed in by their social class and economic status, by their gender and emotional lives, by fate. The dealer dictates the round being played, but poignantly may also be its victim. 

• Dealer’s Choice at Donmar Warehouse until 7 June
• More theatre reviews on theartsdesk