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“You’re a con artist,” cries one character near the start of House of Games, pointing his finger at one of the very few people on stage who isn’t a fraudster. (Or, at least, we don’t think she is.) It’s a gag typical of Richard Bean’s enjoyable 2010 stage adaptation of David Mamet’s 1987 neo-noir screen thriller, in which the scams and cons stack inside one another like a set of Russian dolls. With Jonathan Kent’s spry revival, the play’s preoccupation with belief, betrayal and narrative arrives at a time when scams are a daily scourge, conspiracies run rife and trust is at an all-time low.
Bean focuses the action into two locations: the “House of Games”, here a drinking dive in a Chicago basement, and the neat beige office of author and psychotherapist Margaret Ford (Lisa Dillon). Ashley Martin-Davis’s split-level set stacks them on top of one another, accentuating the stark division between Margaret’s respectable world and the nether realm of gamblers and conmen.
But when Margaret decides to intervene in the case of her patient, Billy (Oscar Lloyd) — a self-proclaimed compulsive gambler — the two worlds become linked. She discovers that the grubby poker game Billy attends is not what it seems, as Mamet plays with the themes of trust, control and confidence. Margaret’s skill at reading people will prove vital — just as it is for the scammers with whom she becomes entangled — and her final move will be to fictionalise her experience for profit.
Into the mix, too, goes the neat fact that all drama relies on the suspension of disbelief, the author’s ability to convince us of the scenario and the actors’ skill in assuming their roles. Here, that irony becomes even more apparent than it does on film, as the gang of swindlers move props and switch costumes to work their cons. In essence, the audience is the ultimate “mark”, willing to believe what’s put before them.
Bean’s script is pithily entertaining, adding wry contemporary touches to Mamet’s examination of masculinity, morals and manipulation and suggesting that, in a world of deepfakes and contested truths, the long con may no longer be confined to seedy basements. Kent’s fine cast relish the opportunity to juggle personalities as the gang of tricksters, with Robin Soans playing the old-school gent, Andrew Whipp the dozy bartender, Siôn Tudor Owen the sleazy drunk and Richard Harrington the smooth mover Mike, working bad guy appeal on Dillon’s successful but uptight Margaret.
The more you buy it, the more fun it is. Wise to turn a blind eye, then, to some of the more unlikely plot twists. What’s more difficult is that the drama doesn’t offer a strong enough framework to support the tougher questions at its heart about love, sex and trust: neither Margaret nor Mike are full enough characters for their attraction and its potentially tragic implications to ring true. Meanwhile the comic crackle of the script takes the sting out of the sheer, ugly nastiness of what happens. It doesn’t quite pull off the hustle, but it’s still very pleasurable to go along for the ride.
★★★☆☆
To June 7, hampsteadtheatre.com
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