If you thought that the play which introduced us to Patrick Marber in 1995 was little more than a trial run for his Closer two years later - and I confess I did – Samuel West’s superb revival at the Menier should disabuse you. Dealer’s Choice is very funny, but beneath the humour you sense much the same darkness. If Closer was a near-definitive study of sexual greed and ruthlessness, the earlier play is equally sharp about our need for danger, destruction and, sometimes, self-destruction.

Act I is preparation for the weekly poker contest that Malcolm Sinclair’s cool, suave Stephen lays on for his staff in his London restaurant; Act II consists of card combat that’s both grippingly real and unpretentiously metaphoric. Even if, like me, you think that a royal flush is something that happens to princesses during the menopause, you’ll be able to follow the ups and downs of a game that isn’t just a game. For one gambloholic participant, Ross Boatman’s Sweeney, it means risking the money he needs to take out the daughter he seldom sees. For Stephen and his son, Samuel Barnett’s weak, Carl, it’s more ominous.

After all, who is the unexpected guest played by Roger Lloyd Pack with something much more grimly inert than a mere poker face? He’s a professional gambler, aptly named Ash, and he’s secretly in cahoots with Carl, who owes him £4,000 and can’t cadge the money from Stephen. There’s plenty here about father-son friction, friendship and betrayal, compulsion and addiction, and men for whom the high life is competing with other men.

In Act II Tom Piper’s set, at first a mix of upmarket restaurant and working kitchen, dwindles to a green-baize table, paralleling the journey of characters who are all sadly limited. The one apparent exception is Stephen Wight’s Mugsy, a waiter so upbeat that he dreams of winning the loot to start his own exotic restaurant in a converted public loo in the East End. He has hilarious lines galore, though he’s been inexplicably robbed of the one about naming his eaterie the Bow Thai.

But, as Wight brilliantly shows, he’s a clown who always loses – and finds that other poker game, life, easier if he loses.

— Box office: 020-7378 1712

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