Latest news with #Dealer'sChoice
Daily Record
14-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Record
ITV Coronation Street fans stunned by real-life sibling revelation
Two former Coronation Street stars are actually siblings in real life - and fans are gobsmacked by the news. Coronation Street fans have been left stunned by the revelation that two former characters from the popular soap are actually siblings off-screen. Matt Milburn first graced the cobbles as Weatherfield's footballing sensation, Tommy Orpington, back in October 2016. Tommy was a familiar face until his departure last year, fleeing to Spain with Tracy McDonald amid a scandalous affair plot. The ITV soap saw the duo form a connection over shared interests when Tommy took up painting and decorating, with the pair eventually seizing the chance to work overseas together. However, it has recently come to light for some soap fans that Matt is indeed the real-life brother of Greg Wood, who played Corrie 's notorious villain Rick Neelan. Rick made his entrance in 2009 and swiftly became a thorn in the side of locals, particularly plaguing Gary Windass (played by Mikey North), reports Belfast Live. Gary ended up killing Rick in a bid to protect his family in 2019, concealing his body in the woods. Rick also left behind a daughter, Kelly, played by Doctor Who's Millie Gibson. Aside from Coronation Street, Greg has taken on other roles in other popular television series, including Trevor Royle in Hollyoaks and Terry Gibson in Brookside. Following his brother's lead, Matt pursued an acting career, although their paths on Corrie never crossed on screen. Matt revealed that it was the sight of his brother performing in a college play that lit the spark for his acting career. He told TV Times: "Watching my brother in his first college play ignited my fire for it [acting]. Seeing the adrenaline surge through him afterwards, I thought: 'I'd love to give that a go.' But I just never did." Landing into acting unfolded through an unlikely twist of fate for Greg. He had been set to film a university pals play, when he ended up starring in Brookside and unexpectedly suggested Matt for a role. Central to their story was the play Dealer's Choice by Patrick Marber, which is set against the backdrop of a poker game. Matt disclosed: "We shot it in the basement at night, and it was such a thrill! About three weeks later, I got an audition for Hollyoaks it felt like my university." Coronation Street viewers were left astonished after discovering that Matt and Greg are siblings off-screen, as they took to social media. A bewildered fan exclaimed on Facebook: "SAY WHAT? Today years old when I found out Rick (Greg Wood) and Tommy O (Matt Milburn) are brothers in real life." The revelation prompted various fan comments, one who noted: "It's funny cause when Tommy came back in I thought it was the guy Gary killed, that would explain why they look so alike lol" Echoing the surprise, another added: " wonder I'm thinking it was him who Gary killed." The comment section quickly flooded with surprised fans, as some remarked: "Didn't know that" and "They look similar." Matt boasts an acting career that expands well beyond the cobbles of Coronation Street. His varied television roles include a stint on Emmerdale as Nicky Pritchard back in 2011. He also made his mark in Hollyoaks, where he portrayed Joe Spencer from 2003 to 2006. Matt and Greg aren't the only siblings with ties to Hollyoaks as their sister Jenny Milburn took on the role of Billie Johnson in the series in 2004.
Time Out
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
Dealer's Choice
Patrick Marber's reputation as a playwright was sealed with 1997's Closer, but wowee his debut Dealer's Choice is good. '1995' screams a giant projection at the start of Matthew Dunster's production. It's a fun gesture but it does not foreshadow a nostalgia fest. It's actually a remarkably prescient play - a mobile phone is showcased prominently and there's a whole bit in it about the gentrification of Bow. One running joke about how Hammed Animashaun's hapless Mugsy wants to turn a disused public toilet into a restaurant sent chills down my spine (I live in Beckenham where we have literally turned the old public loos into a cafe). Above all, it is a play about men, under pressure, playing poker. If anything truly does date it to its era it's that the fizz and crackle of Marber's lads-only dialogue recalls the Brit gangster films of the time (although it does actually predate most of them). Regardless, it's a lean and thrilling beast, that centres on a group of blokes who work in the restaurant in which the after hours poker games are played. The first half is all set up, as we're introduced to the ensemble. Alfie Allen – brother to Dunster's regular muse Lily – was kind of billed as the star, but really the show belongs to Animishawn's ebullient Mugsy. His toilet-centric dreams are mocked by all and sundry, but really he's the only one who feels like he might be able to move on from the gambling. At the start of the story Theo Barklem-Biggs's deadpan chef Sweeney protests that no, he's not going to play a late night poker game hours before being granted a visit with his daughter; it's obvious what will happen. Posh restaurant owner Stephen (Daniel Lapaine) needs the game for myriad reasons – to vent his demons, to validate his uninspiring eatery, to give him an excuse to see his son Carl (Kasper Hilton-Hille). Allen's fey, rootless Frankie says he wants to move to Vegas and become a professional gambler, but is that really escaping this room or doubling down on it? And Carl has fallen into gambling debt, trying to piggy back on Mugsy's toilet scheme to con a couple of grand out of his dad; now the man he owes money to – Brendan Coyle's Ash – has come to collect. The first half of Marber's script sets it all up beautifully. Then, following what I can only describe as a supremely cunty change in Moi Tran's set that moves us from restaurant to basement with maximum ostentatiousness, it's time for the games. Nobody depicts blokes on stage quite like Dunster, who is pretty much the Guy Ritchie of theatre directors. It can sometimes cause problems with subtler fare, but he's in his element with this grimy thriller, getting the best out of his cast for what is, ultimately, an enjoyable story of terrible male desperation. We feel the stakes of the games, but we also recognise the hopelessness of most of these men's situations - nothing is going to free them from the cages they've built for themselves. But that's why Animishawn's Mugsy is so delightful. He's an idiot, but he's a beautiful idiot, a big happy puppy with big (well, toilet-sized) dreams who sails through life unfettered by the mind-forged manacles that hold the others back. Later on, Stephen surreptitiously does him a massive favour, and you sense that it's not out of pity for Muggsy, but because there's still hope for him.
The Guardian
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Dealer's Choice review – Hammed Animashaun is the ace in a busted flush
In 1995, two British playwrights made their debuts with all-male, six-character chamber-pieces strongly influenced by Pinter and Mamet, and set over one long, tense night in London. Jez Butterworth's Mojo and Patrick Marber's Dealer's Choice proved to be superficially dazzling calling cards rather than enduring classics. Now a pallid 30th-anniversary revival of the latter reveals its weaknesses. Set in a restaurant where the manager Stephen (the Paul Bettany-esque Daniel Lapaine) and his employees Frankie (Alfie Allen), Sweeney (Theo Barklem-Biggs) and Mugsy (Hammed Animashaun) are gearing up for a late-night card game, the play brims with bants. Mentions of the National Lottery, which was only a few months old when the play premiered, hint at an incoming gambling epidemic. There are even period-correct beer labels, though credulity is stretched when someone repeatedly gets phone reception in a basement. It is when the writing veers away from jokes and jibes that the play sags irredeemably. Two-thirds of the characters have no inner life, and half are prone to sudden outbursts which resemble artificial attempts to raise the stakes. That almost succeeds when Stephen discovers that his son Carl (Kasper Hilton-Hille) has been gambling with Ash (Brendan Coyle), a rival patriarch, and reacts like a spurned lover. But the absence of peril and gravitas in Matthew Dunster's staging, and in his conception of character, is total. Ash is defeated rather than dangerous. Carl, a slot-machine addict, is about as troubled as Doogie Howser MD. The card games are fatally boring. There are compensations. In Moi Tran's design, the restaurant is dominated by a pebbledash wall the colour of dried blood, which hints at the premises' butcher-shop origins. A spectacular piece of engineering makes us feel as if we are descending into the basement for the second act. This is eclipsed by the most special effect of all: Animashaun, an exuberantly geezerish geyser of charm, toweringly tall and quarterback-shouldered but with a dancer's grace. It is fitting in a play about competitive masculinity that a single performer should emerge victorious, but the contest isn't even close: this is practically a one-man show. 'You've lost the plot,' someone tells Mugsy. 'I am the plot,' he snaps back. Hear, hear. At Donmar Warehouse, London, until 7 June
Telegraph
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Dealer's Choice: 30 years on, Patrick Marber's portrait of male madness still hits home
'Play the man, not the cards' says Mugsy, a waiter who dreams of opening his own restaurant in Patrick Marber's 1995 debut about a group of men who meet every Sunday night to play poker. Yet with every member of this combustible group as good at deceiving themselves as they are each other, it's the game of bluff taking place within their own natures that provide the highest stakes, in this classic study of men addicted to risking week after week everything they have. Marber is best known for his 1997 chamber piece Closer, which applied the ruthlessly transactional nature of late-era Conservatism to the treacherous entanglements between two couples. Yet Dealer's Choice is arguably the better play, partly because although it too nods to the wheeler-dealer cut and thrust of the mid 1990s through the various alpha male delusions of its six male protagonists, it feels less tied to a particular era. Matthew Dunster's 30th-anniversary revival tacitly acknowledges this – in the dimly lit makeshift poker parlour in the basement of Stephen's restaurant where Stephen and his drifter son Carl, Sweeney, Frankie and Mugsy, plus newcomer Ash gather after closing time, we could be at almost any point in the past 30 years. Three decades on, Marber's brutal comedy remains a masterclass portrait of lonely little men wishing themselves into being better people than they are. Dunster's muscular production gives full reign to Marber's blokey banter and apparently off-the-cuff wit. Backstage at the restaurant, chef Sweeney and the waiter Frankie – Alfie Allen, looking and sounding like a young Michael Caine – square up to each other like squabbling puppies. Humour is both armour and a means of macho myth-making. Dreams and denial hang in the air like cigarette smoke, or would do if the uptight fastidious Stephen, who prizes discipline above all else, allowed smoking anywhere in his joint. The divorced Sweeney is determined to keep 50 quid back from the game so he can take out his five-year-old daughter for the day; it's no flaw of the play that we know this won't happen. Stephen, for his part, savagely berates his loser son over his lack of focus and losses at poker; it doesn't take an armchair psychologist to intuit that his loathing for his son's weaknesses is a displacement for his own compulsions. Young, hapless Carl, in an affecting, hollow-eyed performance from Kasper Hilton-Hille, just wants his dad to stop shouting at him. All the same, Dunster's production never quite plays a winning hand. There's a blunted, on-the-nose quality to it that sometimes stands apart from the play's steelier heart – this is, after all, a drama that refuses to countenance redemption. Both Sweeney and Frankie are also too quick to reveal their frustrations – a failure in the writing perhaps, but not resolved here through performance. Yet Brendan Coyle lends a winningly controlled inscrutability to Ash while Hammed Animashaun, a blissfully funny actor, is pure joy as Mugsy, the somewhat dim but still irrepressible waiter who can't understand why no one else thinks an oriental restaurant called Bow Thai in a former public convenience off the Mile End Road is an excellent investment opportunity. He's the butt of everyone's jokes, but in the end perhaps the only winner. Not that Marber allows for any real winners in a game that next week will simply play out all over again.
Evening Standard
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Evening Standard
Dealer's Choice at the Donmar Warehouse review: savagely comic study of blokes playing poker
Dealer's Choice seemed to come out of nowhere in 1995. Marber was a former standup best known as a writer and performer on news spoofs On the Hour and The Day Today: suddenly, he had a play on at the National Theatre. The script showcased the sharp observation he's since honed as a playwright, screenwriter and director. It also drew on his experience of gambling while at Oxford.
