Introducing the first play of Patrick Marber, an English comedian, playwright, director, puppeteer, actor, and screenwriter.
Set in a restaurant and based around a game of poker (and partly inspired by his own experiences with gambling addiction), it opened at the at the National Theatre (Cottesloe) in February 1995 where it won both the 1995 Evening Standard Award for Best Comedy and the Writers' Guild Award for Best West End Play.
This play, is ostensibly about a card school viewed through one night of poker. However, this is merely a metaphor for the masculine obsessions to win and lose and the inability to communicate and bond, let alone build long term relationships.
"Here in one tense, intense, evening that takes us from the emptyish upstairs of a London restaurant down into the basement for the weekly staff poker session - and swings from sublime repartee to wounded rage - Marber shows us human nature at its most guarded and exposed."
Dominic Cavendish, Daily Telegraph.
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