Director Jonathan Kent starts his production of House of Games with a surprise.
It doesn’t begin in the atmospheric poker players’ bar that the incoming audience see on stage. It is an appropriate opening for Richard Bean’s adaptation of David Mamet’s screenplay, which tells the multi-layered tale of a complicated con trick. It follows the main lines of the plot of the 1987 movie, though it alters the ending and adds a lightening of humour to a noirish atmosphere that is well served by Ashley Martin Davis’s set and Peter Mumford’s lighting.
At its centre is Margaret Ford (Lisa Dillon), a Chicago psychotherapist and Harvard alumna who is first seen with an overexcited, bellowing patient trying to deal with addiction. This is suicidal Billy Hahn (Oscar Lloyd), who says he has saddled himself with a huge gambling debt to underworld figure Mike. She tells him she will sort it out, and visits poker dive the House of Games to confront Mike (Richard Harrington).
Margaret isn’t just keen to get Mike off her patient’s back (though she seems to succeed in that); she sees a way to open research for a new book to follow the bestseller self-help book on compulsive behaviour that she has already published, a book that Mike seems to have read (and been impressed by). Realising Mike and his associates are con artists, she has her new subject and Mike, to whom she feels attracted, even wants to co-author. What follows is like a Russian babushka figure, each revelation leading to another one. How do you know what is real here?
House of Games is strongly cast with full-bloodied performances from the poker players: Siôn Tudor Owen as foul-mouthed George complaining at always been given the blustery cowboy role, Andrew Whipp as Bobby, the chummy Hell’s Angel barman (though, as Margaret registers, his not knowing how to make a Manhattan is a give away that he is not what he is supposed to be), and Robin Soans as elderly Joey who brings in their victims.
Then there are a couple of those victims: bankers smartly turned out PJ (Laurence Ubong Williams) and more grandiose Trudi (Kelly Price) who can’t be taken in by fake notes (and watch out—PJ could be a cop). They make role-play real, even Margaret’s sensible PA (Joanna Brookes) could have another life. Dillon gives us Margaret’s Harvard confidence and sense of her own importance, getting a thrill from challenging confrontations, and Harrington gives Mike confidence of a different kind that could turn to menace, but though situations might excite them, there isn’t much sign of the sexual between them, the plot would seem to suggest.
There is a passing reference that posits the Great American Dream as yet another con trick, but this isn’t polemic, it’s entertainment, and at 1 hour and 45 minutes without an interval, it could give you an early night.