Dinner

Synopsis

An artist, a scientist and a sexpot are coming to dinner. Paige , hostess extraordinaire, is celebrating the publication of her husband's best-seller about the psychological apocalypse. The arrival of Mike, marooned in the foggy lane having crashed his van, provides an unexpected addition to the evening's entertainment. A silent waiter, sourced from an obscure website, completes the picture. Primordial Soup is first on the menu - let the dinner from hell begin.

Our Review:

10 December 2003

Plays don't come much weirder, wittier or blacker than Dinner, a comedy about a dinner party from hell in which the hostess, Paige, offers three courses of revenge and disgust to her errant husband, his friends and mistress, ostensibly to celebrate the publication of his latest philosophical tome.

Actually, moral philosophy is coming back into fashion, at least in the theatre. After Tom Stoppard's Jumpers, now revived at the Piccadilly, Dinner offers another journey down the twisting avenues of philosophical thought, as some of the husband's theories are brutally put to the test.

Moira Buffini's play (directed by her sister Fiona Buffini) has lots on the menu, and I don't just mean a "primordial soup" made of algae and living organisms, an "apocalypse of lobster" in which the guests are served a live lobster and have to decide whether to let it live or die, and a dessert made up of the frozen content...

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Latest User Review

USER: Whatsonstage.com (128.40.79.243) - 22 March 2004:

Worth it just for the serving of the lobsters choreographed to Siegfried's Funeral March (will ENO's Twilight of the Gods manage such style!) Otherwise a very classily acted evening, albeit of a serioualy stereotyped script....

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