I visited ‘America’s only private island resort’ where there are no TVs, no children and no mobile phones

We pull off the Overseas Highway, the road that links the Florida Keys, into an unassuming car park. It is tucked away down a palm-tree-lined gravel path, with little else around it. However, as we pull up to reception, a trio of luxury 4x4s being valeted by uniformed staff gives the game away. This is Little Palm Island, America’s only private island resort, and this is just the beginning of our journey.

After being revived from our drive with a signature Gumby Slumber cocktail (created by a longtime bartender infamous for sleeping late), we are led to a wooden jetty, where a gleaming, antique motor yacht awaits. Our captain is exactly the kind of teak-brown seadog you’d want at the helm. His steady hand guides us through the crystal blue waters of the Florida Straits, past islands scarcely big enough to tie a hammock, to Little Palm.

Originally known as Little Munson Island, it served as a haven for rum-runners during the prohibition era and later became a 1940s fishing camp, which was frequented by President Harry Truman. The island’s transformation into a luxury resort began in the 1980s, when developer Ben Woodson took over and invested $8.3m in land and construction.

It is Woodson’s motto — “Do nothing — time is too important to waste” — that defines the resort’s ethos to this day: there are still no phones or televisions in the rooms. Mobile phones are also prohibited in the resort’s public areas. No wonder it’s so popular with celebrities like Michael Keaton, Drew Barrymore, and Cameron Diaz, desperate to escape the ever-present gaze of fans and their filming devices. When the then vice-president Al Gore visited with his wife, Secret Service men tried to blend in by wearing Hawaiian shirts over their bulletproof vests.

We arrive at the four-acre island via a small jetty. There is another, much larger jetty, with deep-water mooring for guests arriving on their own superyachts (two multimillion-dollar behemoths come and go during our stay). Others swoop in by seaplane. We’re staying in an Island Escape Suite — one of just 30 thatched-roof bungalows on the property.

The hotel takes pains to ensure that the island is never inhabited by more than 60 guests at a time, giving you the sense that you’re not really sharing it at all. This feeling is enhanced by the set-up of the suites. We have our own private beach area and wooden slatted walls dividing our bungalow from the next, providing complete privacy.

The rooms themselves are beautifully appointed, with a complimentary minibar (they must not get many Brits or they’d be out of business), outdoor shower, and four-poster bed. Vaulted ceilings and rattan furniture add a West Indies vibe to the ultra-luxurious surroundings. Other thoughtful touches include binoculars for birdwatching, a beach bag, and Yeti tumblers.

Pre-dinner drinks are imbibed at the Monkey Hut bar, which faces the sunset and has live music every other day. Then it’s on to dinner in the dining room, which offers a simple but elegant menu of fresh fish, Caribbean lobster tail, steak, or pasta. Caviar priced up to $375 was also available (but not indulged in). The beauty of dining at Little Palm is more in the personalisation. Want to dine on the beach? Be our guest. A cigar after dinner? Certainly, Sir, allow us to take you to our fire pit area. I’m fairly sure that if I’d asked to eat in the bathroom, they’d have set up a table.

Included in the resort fee is a variety of watersports equipment, such as paddleboards, kayaks and Hobie cats – even small motor boats, which you can take out to explore the islands. As we cruised around in one, a manatee jutted its head out of the water just a few feet from us — a reminder of the archipelago’s unique natural history. Indeed, guests share the resort with more than 100 species of visiting bird, colourful iguanas, and spectacular little Key deer, which swim from island to island and quietly munch their way through vegetation.

Yes, there’s a swimming pool and a spa, and the odd yoga class, but otherwise, Little Palm offers fewer amenities than other five-star hotels in its price bracket. That’s kind of the point, though. This is not the place for those seeking tennis courts and five different restaurants. Guests at Little Palm prefer to do… nothing. The allure lies in its ability to make you forget what you thought you needed (Instagram and Gmail in my case) and remind you of the value in just being still.

Of course, the exclusivity here comes at a price. Its clientele are the kind who arrive by seaplane or yacht and don’t flinch at $100 breakfasts. However, if you can afford it, the resort offers an experience that feels like being stranded on a desert island you’d never want to leave. Forget walking the plank — I’d sprint off it to stay here.

Billy Idol: ‘I’m the sexy sexagenarian. Then I’m gonna be the sexy septuagenarian, ha ha!’

On the big cream couch of The Drew Barrymore Show, the proprietor’s rescue mutt, Douglas, nuzzling between them, host and guest are reliving the bad old days. Or trying to.

On a screen above Drew Barrymore and Billy Idol is a photograph of the pair with their arms around each other at New York’s Limelight club in 1986. The actor turned TV chat show host has an angel’s halo fixed above her head, the punk rock veteran a smiley version of his trademark lip-curl-cum-sneer fixed on his face.

“That is where I see us when I think of you in my mind,” says Barrymore to Idol, as the pair crane their necks at the flashback snap and the studio audience whoops. “Back in the old club days. What the hell do you remember from those days?”

“Not very much!” replies Idol in a gravelly, remarkably well-spoken chuckle that recalls a retired squire from the shires. Albeit one with the same hair and wearing much the same clobber as in that four-decade-old pic: spiky bleach-blond thatch, leather jacket, chunky silver necklaces and a shirt open below the nipples, the better to showboat a chest that’s as smooth, hairless and caramel-coloured as the English punk-rocker’s now 69-year-old face.

To be fair, the old pals’ spotty memories are understandable. Barrymore was only 11 at the time of the pic – and, as she later revealed, already had a drink problem, with drug addiction looming fast on the horizon before she was even a teen. Idol, not unfeasibly, was in his own altered state.

“Drew’s mother used to bring her there when she was eight or something,” Idol tells me from his green room in Manhattan’s CBS Broadcast Center immediately following the chat show’s taping. “So we used to hang out there. I responded to her on an equal level,” he adds of his adolescent friend (Idol was 30). “I didn’t play down or speak down to her. I think she liked that.”

Who was the bad influence on who?

“I think we were a good influence on each other,” he demurs of an actor with whom he would later share screen time, playing himself in 1998’s Eighties-set romcom The Wedding Singer (“I played a rock’n’roll cupid”). “Because I treated her as an equal.” Likely, too, as someone who could relate – kind of – to what he was experiencing.

Barrymore was a child star from the age of seven, courtesy of her generationally defining role in Steven Spielberg’s ET, released four years earlier. By 1986, Idol, too, was a bona fide Stateside phenom, albeit of a very different stripe. He had upped sticks to the US in March 1981 after the collapse of his punk combo Generation X, B-list peers of the Sex Pistols and The Clash. Within a couple of years, the London scene’s prettiest punk was a megastar in America.

That was thanks to the chart success of “White Wedding”, “Dancing with Myself” and “Rebel Yell”, FM radio anthems made with Idol’s regular producer partner and fellow Londoner Keith Forsey. And thanks to a sexy, cartoonishly bad-boy roguishness that made this outrider of the Eighties British Invasion catnip for the recently launched MTV.

Forty-odd years later, both elements – the fist-punching tunes and the nipple-flashing swagger – are impressively present and correct on this grandfather of four’s new album. The nostalgic but defiantly two-fingered Dream Into It is a rollicking nine-song set that features throatily tonsil-to-tonsil collaborations with Joan Jett, Avril Lavigne and Alison Mosshart of The Kills.

Idol’s first album in 11 years is a record that celebrates his Seventies and Eighties excesses – the highs, the lows, the near-fatal motorbike crash (seven operations and a steel rod to repair his shattered right leg) and that time he legged it from rehab for crack cocaine addiction before Forsey could get him out the door. “I said, ‘Let’s just do a hit first.’ And while Keith went off to get someone, I ran away, heh heh!” In the pop-punk ramalam “77”, he enlists sk8r girl Lavigne, born in Canada in 1984, to hymn the thrills of battling skinheads on Chelsea’s King’s Road in the heady summer of 1977: “You gotta swing first and you better not miss! They show their teeth, we kick them in!”

As may already be apparent, Idol enjoyed the fruits of his embrace by mainstream America. When Barrymore asked whether, back then, he ever stopped being “Billy Idol”, he replied in the negative: “I was 24/7 like this.” Or, as he says to me now, his conversational pace slowly revving up after the TV interview: “Well, yeah, the Eighties was really a seminal period.”

That’s putting it decorously. In summer 1984, Neil Tennant interviewed the leather-clad rock’n’roller, whom Smash Hits lovingly lampooned as Sir Billiam of Idol. The Pet Shop Boy wrote of a character whose “behaviour can be unpredictable, to say the least. After a recent concert in Canada, he serenaded a crowd of fans with an impromptu version of ‘Rebel Yell’, standing naked on his hotel room window ledge… Asked live on Countdown, the Australian equivalent of Top of the Pops, what he’d been doing since his arrival in Australia, he replied: ‘Having sex.’”

Then, a sweary, “threatening” appearance on Radio 1’s singles review show Round Table led to Idol’s expulsion from the studio mid-broadcast. “But the BBC still invited him to wander on to Top of the Pops the next week,” reported Tennant. “‘Billy Idol — what are you doing here?’ asked [DJ and presenter] Steve Wright. And Billy paused for a second, as though he’d been wondering much the same himself. Then he remembered. ‘I’ve come here,’ he declared, clenching his fist, ‘to ROCK AND ROLL!’”

“Heh heh heh!” Idol replies, laughing like Dick Dastardly’s Muttley, when I read that to him. Does that article feel like a fair portrait of the artist in the summer of 1984?

“Well, we were super-living it, really,” is his PR-friendly reply. Then he mentions “Still Dancing”, the album’s autobiographical closer. It’s a picaresque that takes in the man born William Broad’s mid-Seventies homeless squat days, near-weekly fights with teddy boys in Brixton, a penchant for smashing up hotel rooms and, in sum, all-round, what-you-got punk defiance. “I was really committed to what I was doing. You had to fight for your right to be there.” The d***-waving and on-air argy-bargy that Tennant reported, then, were simply a demonstration “of how much I, ah, cared about what I was doing”.

He recalls that period with slightly more punch in “Too Much Fun”. It’s a Killers-esque mea culpa of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll: “I kissed a girl and smoked some H… Half a line turned into five… Fell off stage but didn’t die…” he sings. In raunchy trip-down-mammary-lane “Gimme the Weight”, he rues the days when he “loved a thousand girls, it only made things worse”.

Writing those songs was a useful way of processing the ups and downs: his “fatal charm”, the relationships and addictions, “the crazy, different events… But it was quite a different time, the Eighties,” Idol continues, warming up. “Even though Aids was on the horizon, it hadn’t affected the heterosexual people yet. It was still the free love, free sex world. A lot of modern fears hadn’t happened yet. So it was quite an unhinged time.”

“By ’92 it all closed down once Magic Johnson got Aids,” he says of the American basketballer’s November 1991 announcement that he had tested positive for HIV. “People realised how serious it was. Everything changed overnight, almost. So we were living those last days of this liberating time, where people felt that they could have sex at the drop of a hat.”

Idol doesn’t think that means musicians now are, necessarily, boring compared to him and his high-on-life Eighties peers. “It’s just that it’s a different world. People have to think about the diseases and the STDs. We thought that they got rid of [all that]. In the Fifties, they cured syphilis, they cured gonorrhoea. But herpes was happening in the Seventies – I caught herpes. I went to some clinic and they gave me some pills, but they didn’t actually tell me what it was.”

The singer is also, perhaps surprisingly, sympathetic to the pressures facing a younger generation of artists who don’t hesitate to cancel tours to protect their mental health. For the man who, between 1984 and 1985, performed some 130 American gigs in 10 months as his career took off, that wasn’t an option. But, he says with a shrug, “it didn’t hurt us”. Nonetheless, “I can see with social media, this landscape has completely changed in lots of ways. There were only a few [media] outlets in the Eighties – compared to today, [that’s] minuscule. [Now] there’s a million because of the internet. He thinks that inevitably puts pressure onto millennials and Gen Z. “For us, it was just a lot of shows. The modern people, it’s a lot of social media. It’s quite different. And that can affect mental health.”

Accordingly, this is one Baby Boomer – a tribal follower who readily fought with rival youth cults just for the right to wear what he liked – who won’t be heard complaining that millennials are snowflakes.

“Not really. My children are millennials, and they’re having babies – they’ve given me my grandchildren. They seem hardworking, and they care about what they do. I don’t see that at all.” Here, certainly, Billy Idol isn’t “living 24/7” the performative “Billy Idol” that young Drew Barrymore knew and loved.

Still, once a punk, always a punk. This year, Idol is up for induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He’s one of 14 candidates, half of whom will make it through after public voting ends later this month. I ask for his pitch to undecided voters – why should he be inducted?

“Because I’m just f***ing incredible!” he shouts, before going on to clarify. ‘It’s pretty amazing that I went from something like punk rock in England to mainstream success in the States. I was not only involved in punk, I became a big part of the ’80s New Wave. And then I carried on making the music, living the rock’n’roll life. I’ve also gone beyond what people expect, with things like cyberpunk,” he says of his 1993 album of that name. “I didn’t stay in my lane. I took chances. Even coming to America, I had no idea I was going to do really well. And the risks I took worked. All of that shows an enterprising spirit – a spirit of rock’n’roll.”

Vote Idol! But what of the other class of 2025 nominees – does he think Oasis deserve to be in there?

“Of course. I’m a Liam and Noel fan. I played before Oasis in Italy a few years ago. I’m excited for their comeback. I’m looking forward to seeing them.”

Joy Division and New Order? “Definitely deserve to be in it.”

Cyndi Lauper? “She’s a great singer, and she’s written some great songs. So she deserves to be in.”

Mariah Carey? Idol pauses and smiles. “I don’t quite get [this].” But he mentions last month’s iHeartRadio Music Awards in Los Angeles, at which he and Carey both appeared. “They were all bowing down to her as the queen. So maybe there’s an aspect of that. I know sometimes they’re just trying to draw people to the [Hall of Fame] TV show. But she obviously had millions and millions of hits. And she went through a lot with Tommy Mottola, I would have thought,” he says of Carey’s tempestuous marriage to the music industry executive (Mottola wrote in his own memoir that it was “absolutely wrong and inappropriate” for him to become involved with a 19-year-old Carey). “She might have had a bit of a rock’n’roll experience there.”

At the time of our interview, Idol is four weeks out from the start of an arena-scale tour that includes a stop at Wembley in June and stretches towards the end of the year. He admits his midriff is “a little sludgier, but it’s not too bad for my age”. A long-time proponent of a meat-free diet, he’s getting extra gig-fit through exercise and temperance, the former becoming a habit when he moved to LA in 1987. “Working out became a big part of my life. And it helped me get over drug addiction. Caring about your body, eventually that took precedence over the drug addiction. It helped me develop a sense of discipline so I could put the drugs in the rearview mirror.”

Does he allow himself a little drink now and then?

“I’ve actually just stopped drinking. I used to have a glass of wine at a restaurant. I’m just watching out for my liver these days – unfortunately! I’d love to be piling them back! Then again, you put on weight, that’s all that happens with alcohol these days. You just get puffy.” Plus, the hangovers are a killer. “I started getting a really bad headache if I have more than two glasses of wine.” Still, old habits die hard for Mr Too Much Fun. “I still take marijuana and stuff like that, so I’m not completely sober.”

Also in need of some tactical nipping and tucking is that iconic barnet. Again, Idol counts himself pretty lucky. “It’s just about holding on! I just hope I can make it to the finish line. They can make the little bit of hair I’ve got look like a lot! As my hairdresser said: ‘As long as you’ve a little bit of hair, I can work with it.’ With a lot of pomade and dry shampoo, they can do miracles.”

Sir Billiam of Idol will be hoping his signature ’do hangs on until at least 30 November, when he turns 70. There are no big birthday plans currently as he’ll still be on tour, somewhere in the southern hemisphere. But nor will he be going quietly into that good night. “We’ll probably have some wingding South American party.”

Is he looking forward to being 70?

“Errrr… I dunno!” says Idol. “You don’t see yourself ageing. But this one, I might have to celebrate. I’ll be on the road with a load of people I’m enjoying playing with. So we’ll make it fun. It’ll be killer. SEVENTY HERE WE COME!” he shouts, loud enough to frighten Douglas the pooch back on Barrymore’s sofa. Anything else to declare?

“I tell you what: at the moment, I’m the sexy sexagenarian. Then I’m gonna be the sexy septuagenarian, ha ha!”

‘Dream Into It’ (Dark Horse Records) is released on 25 April. Tour tickets available here

Pubs allowed to stay open later to mark VE Day 80th anniversary

Pub across the country will be ringing the last order bell a little later than usual on VE day, as closing time gets pushed back to 1am for the 80th anniversary.

The prime minister has given the green light for pubs and bars to stay open two extra hours on Thursday 8 May.

Sir Keir Starmer has called for the nation to unite in honour of the wartime generation as the UK marks 80 years since VE Day.

He said it was a moment to “remember the incredible sacrifices” made during the Second World War and to celebrate “the peace and freedom” they won.

Extending pub hours, he added, would give people the chance to “raise a glass to all of the men and women who served their country, both overseas and at home.”

Pub hours have been relaxed before for occasions of “exceptional national significance” such as the Euro 2024 final and King Charles’ coronation weekend..

Michael Kill, chief executive of the Night Time Industries Association, said extending pub hours would give the industry a boost.

He said: “As someone with a strong family background in the armed forces, I know how vital it is to honour the legacy of those who served.

“VE Day is not only a moment of remembrance but also an opportunity for communities to come together.

“At such a challenging time for the hospitality sector, allowing businesses to extend their trading hours during these celebrations offers a much-needed boost while paying tribute to our shared history.”

VE Day commemorations will start on the May bank holiday on Monday 5 May.

The Cenotaph will be dressed in Union flags and there will be a military procession from Whitehall to Buckingham Palace and an RAF flypast over London.

On 8 May, there will be a party at Horse Guards Parade showed live on BBC One.

Four-foot-long caiman seized in police search of Essex home

A four-foot-long caiman has been seized by police in a search of a home in Essex as two people were arrested on suspicion of drugs and weapons offences.

The animal, which has now been handed over to the RSPCA, was among the items found by officers executing a warrant at an address in Aveley near Grays on Thursday.

A significant cannabis haul and several weapons including knives were also discovered and seized.

A 36-year-old man, from Purfleet, was arrested on suspicion of production of cannabis, contravention of the dangerous wildlife act and possession of an offensive weapon, while a 35-year-old woman was arrested for the same offences as well as on suspicion of possession with intent to supply drugs, Essex Police said.

Both have since been released under investigation.

Inspector Dan Selby said: “Drugs cause misery in our communities and we work hard to tackle their production and sale.

“We know this matters to the public and we value our neighbourhoods so these issues matter to us.

“We are also ensuring the welfare of the caiman and have left it in the hands of the RSPCA.”

Caimans live in marshes, swamps, lakes, and mangrove rivers. The animals are native to Central and South America.

Alfie Allen: ‘There has to be something on the line for it to matter’

Play the man, not the cards.” It’s a credo that goes to the heart of the game of poker – and it’s central to Patrick Marber’s 1995 play Dealer’s Choice, which is being revived at London’s Donmar Theatre this month. Poker is a simple game of statistical probability, but also a complex mesh of psychology and personality, and no one wins by relying on maths alone. In poker, the harder someone tries to make themselves unreadable, the more likely they are to show everything. It’s this sense of enigma that is at the heart of so many of Alfie Allen’s performances, which, in recent years, have encompassed a Tony-nominated turn on Broadway, primetime BBC dramas and acclaimed film roles. There’s a sense of self-containment but also of still waters running deep. It’s no surprise that the play’s producers have cast Allen as Frankie, considered the best poker player among the friends who play a weekly game together in what was Marber’s debut.

Having caught the laddish zeitgeist in its year of release, Dealer’s Choice has proved endlessly revivable; it’s knotty and complex enough to plausibly return and make sense in any number of different eras and contexts. It centres around a group of men – all working in the same restaurant, all struggling with thwarted dreams and all hoping, slightly desperately for something better. They’re united by their poker games; a realm in which they can take responsibility and simultaneously surrender it.

In common with many of the cast members, Allen had never played poker before rehearsals for the play began. But their first revelation was the most important. “We learnt that there’s got to be something on the line for it to matter,” he says. “We were all just betting with fake chips, but we realised that it doesn’t really mean anything unless you’re playing with your own money. And as an actor, that’s definitely at the core of what I try and figure out about every part I play: what’s at stake? There are the obvious things that are at stake in terms of money but you try and dig a little deeper.”

In its Donmar incarnation, the play sits comfortably within the current discourse around masculinity. Allen’s Frankie is a cocky but slightly brittle young alpha-male. He’s not only the best poker player in the group but a prolific ladies’ man to boot. Is there, though, slightly less to him than meets the eye? As the group bickers over the cards, all of them end up unconsciously revealing slightly more about themselves than they’d like.

This is probably not a trait that can ever be applied to Alfie Allen in person. There’s never any danger of him overplaying his hand. When we meet in the Donmar’s Covent Garden offices, he’s unfailingly affable despite a long day of rehearsals – a process he seems to be enjoying every bit as much as the actual prospect of performance. He’s sympathetic and amused rather than irritable when my recording device malfunctions and generous with his time. And yet there’s a slight sense of guardedness about him.

And really, that’s not too surprising. As the son of famously garrulous and unguarded actor, presenter, comic and general overlord of Eighties and Nineties excess, Keith Allen, Alfie learnt about the pleasures and perils of the limelight at a young age. The success – and tabloid-related travails – of his singer-sister Lily presumably drove the point home. Questions about his family elicit lengthy pauses and not much more. You suspect he’s not so much unwilling to talk about them as slightly sick of the questions. “My family is my family, you know?” he says.

What, you suspect, does animate him is his work, which is increasingly both varied and impressive. Dealer’s Choice captures the robust, often combative nuances of male friendship brilliantly. “That’s sometimes how a strong friendship is built,” as Allen puts it. “You can go to the extremes and then kind of go back to ‘actually, we’re alright aren’t we?’ He’s also modest enough to give Marber most of the credit for this. “Patrick’s writing really does the work for you in that respect,” he says. “There are no big, performative monologues in this. It’s always about what the other person is doing. That’s how it becomes a proper dance.”

But it takes two to tango. And more and more, it seems Allen is building a portfolio of vulnerable men in extremis. Alongside Frankie, there’s his wracked, tormented Theon Greyjoy in Game of Thrones (“an amazing, crazy 10 years of my life… that took me to places I didn’t think I could go”). The torture of Theon in the show pivoted around castration, emasculation and humiliation. Last year, Allen played the title role in McVeigh, a timely exploration of America’s deadliest domestic terrorist, Timothy McVeigh, who perpetrated the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, killing 167 people, including 19 children. And in 2022, there was Steven Knight’s SAS: Rogue Heroes in which he played another real-life character, Jock Lewes, the founding principal training officer of the regiment and a man who combined extreme personal discipline with a maverick streak of wildness.

In realising his screen version of Lewes, Allen did something very characteristic. He offered up a performance that was expressive while being entirely without ego. “I didn’t want to veer too far from the version of him I’d read about – I just looked at the love letters that he wrote to his wife-to-be,” he says. “There’s a whole book of them and that was my source material. I didn’t really want to jazz it up or put my spin on it – I wanted to stay true to what the real life version was”.

It’s tempting here to make a comparison to Alfie’s father Keith, who, for all of his charisma (in fact, probably, because of it), seems to essentially play Keith Allen in every role. Alfie Allen was famously raised in the public eye – Lily has spoken of evenings where the siblings were left upstairs at the Groucho Club while their dad enjoyed himself in the bar downstairs – and has explored the party animal lifestyle himself. But there’s something else in a character like Jock Lewes; a sense of ingrained self-denial that feels like a revealingly antithetical response to this. “Jock was an aloof disciplinarian,” Allen says. “He was raised in a Protestant household, so maybe [the SAS] was his outlet. It gave him a way of channelling his need for structure.” Could something similar be said of Allen himself – and in particular, his ability to disappear into character?

Like the culture itself, it feels like Allen has come a long way. He and Theo Barklem-Biggs (fellow SAS Rogue Hero and one of his co-stars in Dealer’s Choice) set up a therapeutic forum for the cast and crew while on set in Morocco. “There was a bunch of people who didn’t know each other, all plonked in the middle of the desert,” Allen explains. “Which is a bit like what it would be like in the army I guess! It was really good to have that kind of outlet, where everyone felt they could sit around and speak to each other.” For the duration of the run at the Donmar, he and Barklem-Biggs are sharing a flat in central London – there’s a sense of intimacy and honesty, both in and out of character.

So when Allen talks about what’s at stake in the context of Dealer’s Choice, it’s clear that he’s talking about more than money. Dealer’s Choice, like most of the actor’s recent parts, is about how men talk to each other – and in some cases, what happens when they don’t.

But have things moved on since the play was first staged? “I guess they have in terms of talking about love and intimacy and mental health,” he says. “Obviously, I was only eight or nine in 1995 so it wasn’t all that evident to me then but in terms of things being better now, maybe then there was just a kind of unspoken understanding… that sometimes men would just bury things and move on. Whereas now, I think we feel more free to build on that and talk.” In terms of playing the man and not the cards, it feels like Dealer’s Choice – and Alfie Allen himself – has found itself in tune with another cultural moment. He might not be a born gambler. But he certainly isn’t playing it safe either. He’d almost certainly be an excellent poker player, I suggest. “I’d like to think I could be a good bluffer,” he replies. “But it’s all about knowing when to bet.”

‘Dealer’s Choice’ is at the Donmar Warehouse until 7 June