Dinner

PLAYS like Mike Leigh’s Abigail’s Party, and Tony Grounds’ recently screened The Dinner Party, delight in ridiculing the nouveau riche. Moira Buffini’s absurdist comedy, Dinner, targets the Guardian-reading intelligentsia. The obnoxious Paige is throwing a dinner party to celebrate the publication of her husband Lars’ self-help book. While Lars is happy to peddle his dippy brand of consumerist Buddhism, he shrinks from telling Paige of his desire to leave her. Matters are not helped by the arrival of their first guest, Wynne, an insipid earth mother who clearly dotes on her self-regarding host. Next up is Hal, a pathologically insecure scientist who’s brought along his latest trophy ‘partner’, the glacially beautiful newsreader, Sian.

Add to the mix an uninvited van driver and a chillingly efficient butler and you have a seriously volatile social cocktail. But while the play boasts some good one-liners, it lacks shape. The characters, who mostly exist to represent various world views, are strictly two-dimensional beings. There is also a striking lack of character consistency. Why, for instance, does the imperious Sian suddenly become so lost and needy?

That said, director Alexander Holt coaxes some fine performances from his spirited cast, particularly Ava Burton as the endlessly anodyne Wynne. And Mike Lee’s set deserves special mention for its delicious vulgarity.

Evil dinner party game is a treat

Rating *****

AT FIRST, one is totally mesmerised by the Mike Lees’ magnificent Gothic dining room set — all purple, silver, and black. Then we are intrigued by the appearance of the sinister black-garbed waiter who obeys every whim of the shrill dominatrix of a hostess Paige (Sally Faulkner), gaudily-clad in blinding peacock blue. All the characters are larger than life in colours taken from Cluedo characters. Host Lars (Jonathan Kemp) in mustard, has written a philosophical treatise and thinks he is God. Ava Burton in green is wonderfully funny as Wynn the artist who describes herself as a provocative eroticist. She is a hostess’s nightmare — a vegan! Hal (P J King) in plum is a renowned microbiologist and his wife (Stephanie Briggs), in scarlet, is a blonde TV newsreader. These are people obsessed with themselves, their greed and their images — cunningly reflected in the mirrored background. Despite the conventional who dunnit set up — five dinner guests trapped by a dense fog — it is not so much a whodunit as a who is going to do it and to whom! All are fair candidates. One of the guests is missing.But his place is taken by stranded van driver Mike (Craig Giovaneili) who removes his anorak to reveal a white shirt. And serving them all is the waiter (Ali Amadi) who represents mute malevolence. Paige has devised an evil game which they all must play. It is through this game that many ghastly truths emerge. The dialogue is clipped, brittle and bitchy, destructive and delightful. It is Noel Coward with overtones of Freddie Kruger. The set is so magnificent the actors have to work hard to come up to it.All give powerful comic performances. The direction by Alexander Holt is, as always, impeccable. And the lighting, by Lawrence Stromski, is full of atmospheric quirkiness. All together it is stunning, a very funny and horrid play. I can’t wait to see it again!

Rating: *** The annals of performance and literature are strewn with mealtime melodramas, from Bruce Norris’ recent Royal Court premiere of ‘The Pain and the Itch’ right through to The Last Supper. But when a meal starts with a slow-cooked algae broth titled primordial soup, it’s apparent that haute cuisine isn’t on the menu of Moira Buffini’s scathing attack on middle-class mores.

In one of London’s most exclusive environs, Paige, a society hostess married to Lars and a distinguished graduate of the ‘Cruella De Vil charm school’, invites prickly newsreader Sian, her scientist husband Hal and Wynne, a dizzy artist, to celebrate the publication of ‘Beyond Belief’, Lars’ Nietzschean prescription for psychological renewal.

Wynne is a devotee of more than just his book. Lars is planning to divorce Paige. There’s a silent waiter who hangs over the dinner table like death. The main course is live lobster which the guests have to cook or set free.

And Wynne is a vegetarian. Add to this, copious amounts of wine and a surprise dinner guest in the form of a wideboy van driver, and you have all the ingredients for a pretty explosive evening.

Alexander Holt’s sprightly production takes a while to warm up but finds its rhythm in a punchy second act, which culminates in a genuinely gripping climax (note: this is the revised ending which premiered at the Wyndham’s, not the National). The cast delivers Buffini’s razor-sharp humour with gusto and Mike Lee’s garish set underscores their vacuous ostentation. It might be a little over-seasoned for more delicate palettes, but Holt makes a decent meal out of ‘Dinner’.

Moira Buffini’s Dinner is the dinner party from hell, a glorious nightmare, peopled with narcissistic guests most of whom loathe each other, and served inedible food by a strikingly exotic mute waiter. Recognise this scenario? Well you may either have been to such a dinner party (in which case God alone can help you), or it is familiar from its popular National Theatre and West End runs in 2002/3.

Paige is throwing a dinner party to celebrate the publication of her husband Lars’s latest book, which happens to be one of those best-seller psychobabble types. She has invited the microbiologist Hal, also a successful writer on his subject, and his second wife Sian, the nation’s sexiest newsreader and prototype Abi Titmuss. Also present is the eccentric artist Wynne, who totally lives by Lars’s theories, and has just been dumped by her long-term partner.

As it is a foggy night, anything can happen and an unexpected visitor – Craig Giovanelli’s white van man Mike – has just crashed his van into a ditch and needs to use the phone. To entertain the guests he tells or fabricates his life story, playing on fears that he has come to steal the jewels. He is the pawn in a power struggle between Paige and Lars, who alternately order him to leave/stay put; more than that, he becomes the catalyst for the truth to be unmasked from the lies lived by the hosts and their guests.

This bitingly witty black comedy has a script full of little digs from one half of a couple to their beloved, as well as full broadsides from Sally Faulkner’s arch-bitch ‘We need drinks’ Paige to everybody. Ava Burton’s scatty and totally, totally artsy Wynne is a vegetarian and is concerned that the strange-tasting soup really contains no meat – Of course it doesn’t snaps Paige, unless you count the zooplankton in it which may have formed during the three weeks of its fermentation at room temperature.

This bitingly witty black comedy has a script full of little digs from one half of a couple to their beloved, as well as full broadsides from Sally Faulkner’s arch-bitch ‘We need drinks’ Paige to everybody. Ava Burton’s scatty and totally, totally artsy Wynne is a vegetarian and is concerned that the strange-tasting soup really contains no meat – Of course it doesn’t snaps Paige, unless you count the zooplankton in it which may have formed during the three weeks of its fermentation at room temperature. Yuk, but only the first and least worst of many. To follow are Apocalypse of Lobster, and for pudding Frozen Waste, which are quite as bad as they sound. The evening descends into full-pitched battle between Paige and Jonathan Kemp’s urbane though increasingly disconcerted Lars; and PJ King’s supercilious Hal who has nothing but disdain for Stephanie Briggs’s sharply smart but uber-resentful Sian.

And in case the evening grinds to a conversational abyss, Paige has prepared a cheery subject for each person, so they can discourse for 2 minutes. Sian is scarily articulate on Murder Weapons; Wynne describes how Lars took her cherry 20 years previously in How Wynne met Lars; and Lars coldly proves How Lars dumped Paige. Ali Amadi’s creepy Waiter springs his deadly surprise; and so this very dark, very enjoyable play draws to its bitter end.