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Kieron Quirke's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Samuel West.
Cast: Samuel Barnett, Ross Boatman, Roger Lloyd Pack, Jay Simpson, Malcolm Sinclair, Stephen Wight
Description: A revival of Patrick Marber's drama about a supposedly friendly poker game which turns into a highly charged evening of psychological tension and violence. Directed by Samuel West.
Trains: Tube: Charing Cross, Embankment 
Phone: 0870060 6632
Website: www.theambassadors.com/trafalgarstudios
Trigger fingers: The shiftless Carl (Sam Barnett) is threatened by hustler Ash (Roger Lloyd Pack) during a poker game that turns sour
It's very difficult not to like Dealer's Choice. Patrick Marber's 1995 play, his first, doesn't reach as deep inside the human condition as it pretends - but it remains cool, funny and supremely accessible. It's properly served in Sam West's rock-solid revival, transferred from the Menier, which does little exceptionally but a lot well.
The play is about a poker game - one in a weekly series between Stephen, proprietor of a London restaurant, Carl, his shiftless son, and three of the staff. Only on this occasion Carl has invited a friend.
In the first act preamble we learn what everyone has at stake. In the second act game, we see them lose it, all accompanied by Marber's fine dialogue: very direct, very nasty, very male chat peppered with good jokes and creative obscenity.
The antidote to all this snide aggression is Stephen Wight's Mugsy, the idiot, luckless waiter. Young Wight makes him a sitcom fool, played several levels of reality above the others. It's very funny, and when late on he actually makes us feel for this tool, you understand why Wight recently won the Standard's Best Newcomer Award.
The game proves a mirror of the players' wider lives. Malcolm Sinclair's deeply sympathetic Stephen is nonetheless an embodiment of class superiority. He affects equality with his staff, while goading them into gambling away their wages then taking paternalistic pleasure in bailing them out.
The personality flaws that dog the men's lives fail them again at the table, ruthlessly exposed by Roger Lloyd Pack's cold hustler Ash. The play can be over-explicit. As the losses pile up, we are told that Mugsy secretly loves losing, that flash waiter Frankie is afraid of winning - pop psychiatry revelations that the actors play as if they have been told they married their mothers.
But there are many moments of genuine emotional jeopardy - the silent, angry pain of Sinclair when he realises his son has betrayed him is a treat. One bewildering bit of staging, perhaps a side effect of the transfer, mars the first half, but otherwise, if you haven't yet seen this play, you should now.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
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