Dinner with Friends

Synopsis

Beth has come for dinner with friends Karen and Gabe in their Connecticut kitchen, but she's come alone. As the lemon almond polenta dessert is served, she reveals the real reason for her partner Tom's absence. In this comedy of marital imperfection, two couples find one infidelity too much for four to bear.

Our Review:

2 July 2001

In Isak Dinesen's fable Babette's Feast, all the dinner guests experience an increasing sense of spiritual goodness. By the meal's end, they are transformed into an almost beatific state, approaching enlightenment. However, even before dessert is served in Act One of Dinner With Friends, a character is already hitting the troughs of wailing depression, leaving both her hosts edgy and embarrassed.

Donald Margulies' play certainly has food at the heart, if not quite the soul, of its proceedings. At the outset, culinary critics Gabe (Rolf Saxon) and Karen (Samantha Bond) are entertaining old friend Beth (Elizabeth McGovern). The couple are in raptures over a recent working holiday in Italy, bound up in shared memories and experiences. But somewhere between the risotto and the lemon polenta cake, Beth cracks under the domestic bliss and admits her marriage to Tom (Kevin Anderson) seems to be over.

McGovern, an eternally welcome sight on stage, ras...

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Latest User Review

USER: Whatsonstage.com - 5 July 2001:

I enjoyed it too if a bit too "american". I could recognise the struggles that these couples faced, it's really trying when friends divorce....

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