House of Games

Synopsis

Harvard-educated psychoanalyst Margaret Ford is celebrated for her bestselling book ‘Driven! Compulsion and Obsession in Every Day Life’. Helping one of her patients settle his gambling debts, she compromises her professional reputation and is drawn into the seedy underworld of the House of Games poker club. Seduced by charismatic hustler Mike, Margaret convinces herself that she can make an academic study of the con-artist. Before she realises it, Margaret is entangled in a fast-paced thriller.

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 17 September 2010

David Mamet’s 1987 movie House of Games is one of the modern cinema’s psychological thriller greats. It’s also mysterious and sometimes impenetrable. Richard Bean’s new stage adaptation is true but different, gripping but transparent, and full of genuine stage thrills.

It works, in fact, as a sort of black farce, and is given a new tone of absurdity that is purely theatrical. It’s a genuine adaptation, whereas the Almeida’s Ingmar Bergman show, Through a Glass Darkly, earlier this year, was a pointless, un-theatrical re-mix.

Lindsay Posner’s production, on a superb split-level design by Peter McKintosh, with a Ry Cooder-ish spooky guitar score by Django Bates, mixes Mamet’s aggressive swagger with Bean’s satirical cheek.

There’s a new character, a tattooed goon played by John Marquez, in the seedy bar-room poker school, and a tantalising, unintended red herring i...

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Latest User Review

David Baxter - 4 November 2010:

This is the third attempted posting and I'm getting pretty fed up with the problems on this site. After an absolutely horrific journey to Islington thanks to the tube workers holding London to ransom, House of Games had to be good. It was - but only just. The scenes in the House of Games itself are directed with great vigour by Lindsay Posner and mamet's snappy dialogue is given full justice by a very sharp cast containing only one America. Richard Bean's adaptation is amusing rather than laugh out loud funny and it's difficult to overcome the problem that when it's clear that the whole play is based on a series of con tricks the main deception becomes blindingly obvious. The mini twist st the end is clever though and House of games works well as an essentially shallow entertainment rather than a great drama....

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