1987 was the year of the conman. Donald Trump wrote The Art of the Deal, or at least had his name on the cover, and the playwright David Mamet made his film directing debut with House of Games, a thriller in which Mike draws Margaret, a psychotherapist, into his world of tells, bluffs and long cons.
For the stage adaptation, Richard Bean (One Man, Two Guvnors) has retained the plot while surrounding Mike with a more broadly comic posse whose charms are exhausted long before their stage time. The locations have been reduced to a manageable two. Occupying the upper half of Ashley Martin-Davis’s set is Margaret’s office, crisp and bright but occasionally lined with noirish stripes. Beneath the office – and very much the id to its ego – is the dingy bar where Mike and his crew mount the elaborate cons that resemble fringe theatre performances (one of the reasons why the screen-to-stage switch makes sense). In the opening split-seconds, director Jonathan Kent and lighting designer Peter Mumford pull off a minor trick of their own: a visual switcheroo more satisfying than anything in the play proper.
