House of Games review – Richard Bean hustles David Mamet’s movie tricksters

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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.

Bean teases the material into new shapes which continue or comment on other Mamet works. A familial triangle mirrors the ones in American Buffalo and The Cryptogram: Billy, the antsy gambler whose plight first connects Margaret to Mike, is made an explicitly filial figure, with the therapist and the conman his surrogate parents. That choice pays off nicely during the explicitly Oedipal confrontation that gives the play its climax.

Where House of Games never gels is in the marriage of Mamet’s ascetic sensibility with Bean’s crowd-pleasing cheer: it’s the equivalent of an emaciated figure in a baggy suit. Kent’s direction of the ensemble scenes also has a frustrating shapelessness; the central sequence is so unfocused that any tension has dissipated by the time the con is revealed.

Despite the efforts of Lisa Dillon as Margaret, Richard Harrington as Mike and especially Oscar Lloyd, the show’s standout as Billy, this is a low-stakes enterprise overall. Then again, perhaps none of its bait-and-switch tricks could ever compete with the ultimate real-life plot-twist: Mamet going Maga.