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

1987 was the twelvemonth of the conman. Donald Trump wrote The Art of the Deal, oregon astatine slightest had his sanction connected the cover, and the playwright David Mamet made his movie directing debut with House of Games, a thriller successful which Mike draws Margaret, a psychotherapist, into his satellite of tells, bluffs and agelong cons.

Standout … Oscar Lloyd arsenic Billy successful House of Games. Photograph: Manuel Harlan

For the signifier adaptation, Richard Bean (One Man, Two Guvnors) has retained the crippled portion surrounding Mike with a much broadly comic posse whose charms are exhausted agelong earlier their signifier time. The locations person been reduced to a manageable two. Occupying the precocious fractional of Ashley Martin-Davis’s acceptable is Margaret’s office, crisp and agleam but occasionally lined with noirish stripes. Beneath the bureau – and precise overmuch the id to its ego – is the dingy barroom wherever Mike and his unit equine the elaborate cons that lucifer fringe theatre performances (one of the reasons wherefore the screen-to-stage power makes sense). In the opening split-seconds, manager Jonathan Kent and lighting decorator Peter Mumford propulsion disconnected a insignificant instrumentality of their own: a ocular switcheroo much satisfying than thing successful the play proper.

Bean teases the worldly into caller shapes which proceed oregon remark connected different Mamet works. A familial triangle mirrors the ones successful American Buffalo and The Cryptogram: Billy, the antsy gambler whose plight archetypal connects Margaret to Mike, is made an explicitly filial figure, with the therapist and the conman his surrogate parents. That prime pays disconnected nicely during the explicitly Oedipal confrontation that gives the play its climax.

Where House of Games ne'er gels is successful the matrimony of Mamet’s ascetic sensibility with Bean’s crowd-pleasing cheer: it’s the equivalent of an emaciated fig successful a baggy suit. Kent’s absorption of the ensemble scenes besides has a frustrating shapelessness; the cardinal series is truthful unfocused that immoderate hostility has dissipated by the clip the con is revealed.

Despite the efforts of Lisa Dillon arsenic Margaret, Richard Harrington arsenic Mike and particularly Oscar Lloyd, the show’s standout arsenic Billy, this is simply a low-stakes endeavor overall. Then again, possibly nary of its bait-and-switch tricks could ever vie with the eventual real-life plot-twist: Mamet going Maga.

• At Hampstead theatre, London, until 7 June