House of Games; A house of cards that couldn’t quite stand on its own

In between large scale west end shows, I took the opportunity to see a show called House of Games at a fringe theatre. While its lower budget definitely showed through in some aspects, it gave a good perspective of the different levels of theatre and had some really interesting ideas, especially in regards to set.

The plot revolves around a therapist who while trying to get one of her clients debt erased gets caught up with a team of con men, only to end up being their target. This brought about my first criticism, which was that either the writer does not understand the role of a therapist, or the character is terrible at her job. While her being a bad therapist could have been a purposeful decision, it did not feel backed up by the rest of the story and did not seem to be the objective. Her getting directly involved with the personal life of one of her clients to this degree is extremely unprofessional, and does not even work to address the problem that she has been paid to assist with. I do not understand her objective in trying to help her client with a gambling addiction by simply paying off the debt caused by the addiction.

Outside of the big picture of the story, the character to character interactions also felt very off. I am not sure whether the majority of the blame should go to the script or the acting, but large chunks of the dialogue felt very uncomfortable. This greatly breaks the illusion of chemistry between the two main characters, because the plot is trying to imply a romantic connection that we are clearly not seeing on stage. The love interest is a very charismatic con man, but it doesn’t really work because he is not portrayed charismatically at all. It breaks the suspension of disbelief when I see the character acting somewhat creepy and weird and all the characters around him are acting like he was being suave and cool.

The best part of the play by far in my opinion was the set. It was double layered with the top being the therapists office and the bottom being the seedy bar that is the hideout of the group of con men. The clean and pristine office juxtaposed against the dirty bar shows an interesting contrast between the therapist’s two “worlds”, and both sets are well detailed without being too busy.

There were also some interesting moments in the plot where the acting worked for me, which was when the cons were actually being played out. While I did not feel like the main love interest was particularly charismatic in a romantic sense, he was good at playing a convincing character which worked well in the cons. The interaction within the team was also very engaging and I feel like it worked best when they were actively in one of their plans. While the ending did feel predictable for the most part, it was still very enjoyable to actually see the big final job play out and see exactly how they pulled it off.

Overall I didn’t hate the play, and I recognize after seeing so many huge west end productions I am probably at my most critical right now. If it was one of the first plays after arriving in London I probably would have been a little less critical, but just coming off of Benjamin Button which is still one of my favorite shows that we have seen, I was already hard pressed to be impressed. While it was not my favorite it was definitely still worth seeing in my opinion for the set alone. I really enjoy seeing creative solutions to showing multiple locations and I feel like it was done well here. Also seeing the occasional rough production just puts into perspective how amazing some of the other shows are.