Dinner: the guests may be underfed, but the audience is glutted with an evening of dark, richly satirical tragi-comedy.
Who doesn’t enjoy drama at a dinner party? When you’re not involved, of course. Unfortunately for the guests at this particular dinner, everyone becomes involved in one way or another, with disturbing, hilarious and dark consequences.
This production of ‘Dinner’ by Moira Buffini, directed by David Fairs and Conor O’Kane, is the first revival of the play since its West End run more than 20 years ago. Set in the early 2000s, it portrays a world of wealth, greed and the pomposity of a self-satisfied liberal elite. The internet is just starting to become a thing, and guess what? You can get absolutely anything you like on it! Your darkest desires arrive at your door, neatly tied up with a sash – in this case, a silent waitress dressed in traditional Japanese dress. The hostess, Paige, played with chilling sarcasm by Matsume Kai, has hired the waitress to serve her assortment of guests: a microbiologist, his newsreader wife, a flowery artist and (unexpectedly) a van driver who got lost in the fog outside. This production adds the element of Japanese ceremony to the formalities of the English elite’s dinner parties, creating another binding of ritual and custom that inevitably cannot keep the dinner from falling apart.
The guests are gathered to celebrate a book written by Paige’s husband, Lars, entitled ‘Beyond Belief’; a pop-psychology self-help book intended to encourage devotees to find their ‘psychic drive’, with a ready disciple in the flowery artist, Wynne (Rebecca Joy Wilson). The comedy was struck with an almost pitch-perfect note by all the cast, preventing the badinage from becoming leaden in a play which descends into the back and forth careless cruelty to be expected of a pretty hollow bunch.
As each course arrives, the mood sours further; in a particularly tough moment for Wynne, the only vegetarian present, she is presented with a raw cabbage. The cabbage silently stares back at her from her plate. She is luckier than the other guests, who have to decide whether they will boil their lobster main alive, or send it to live a long and happy life in the briny pond outside. As the play becomes more farcical, the skill of the actors keeps it anchored in emotional realism. Oliver Maynard and Clarisse Zamba, the microbiologist and the newsreader, movingly convey the complexity of a relationship frayed with resentment and tension, but rooted in real love.
The production is a visual feast, with the striking backdrop of black ink dissolving on the white folding screens, with a simple set of low tables that are arranged and rearranged throughout the play to create different formations. The muted aggression and simmering tension are released in transition moments of blaring music and wild dancing; in one particularly effective moment, Paige dances as if possessed, before the lights reveal the characters arranged in another beautiful, cold formation. They sit like a Lotte Laserstein painting – present, but each wrapped up in their own inward-gazing world, nursing their own wounds and then lashing out again.
For a play written twenty years ago, it feels strikingly relevant to our society today; a black comedy that relentlessly satirises a greed that’s never satiated. You’re left thinking: would I boil that lobster, or would I put it in the briny pond and be able to face my reflection in the surface of the water?
Dinner is at the Omnibus Theatre until the 24th May. Tickets linked here.