This play is done like a Dinner
There's a line in Moira Buffini's 2002 play when a woman, overhearing an ex-soldier's stories of his violent exploits in Liberia, exclaims "You killed a LIBRARIAN?" Boom-tish!
Make of that gag what you will but we can assume those involved in Dinner, directed by Kate Cherry, aren't approaching the undertaking too seriously. Or at least they shouldn't be.
There are other clues to that lack of serious intent. The best is Ash Gibson Greig's crafty Hitchcockian score - but of Alfred Hitchcock Presents rather than Frenzy or Rear Window. The most awkward was the focus on the designer wear being modelled by the show's actresses, which gave proceedings something of the atmosphere of the Brownlow Medal red carpet.
Cherry's program notes allude to themes of the nature of truth and the shadows of the past, while both the text and Trent Suidgeest's wide-open conservatory set are heavy with meaningful fog banks, but what we get is a script for a murder-mystery dinner party dashed off by Alan Ayckbourn, and a hyperactive smoke machine.
Paige (Tasma Walton, devilishly red and resplendent in Ae'lkemi) is throwing a dinner party in honour of her husband Lars (Steve Turner) and his recent success with an excruciating-sounding philosophical how-to-do-it life manual called Beyond Belief.
She's also invited Lars' old flame Wynne (Alison van Reeken, dressed by Love in Tokyo) and her husband, who, much to Paige's gleeful disappointment has run off with his office girl and doesn't show.
There's also Lars' old chum Hal (Greg McNeill), who seems extraordinarily dull for someone who, we're told, does something hush-hush, and his new wife Sian (Rebecca Davis, in Tindale), a slim, tall television newsreader who's clearly far too young, tall, slim (and smart) for him.
There's a mysterious waiter (Kenneth Ransom, in black tie) who's been hired by Paige for services that manifestly extend beyond waiting table, and, before long, a slightly injured chap called Mike (Stuart Halusz) who's crashed his van in the fog, needs to use the phone and may or may not be a burglar.
Did I mention Alan Ayckbourn?
In her notes Cherry says it's hard to talk about the play without giving away its secrets, and I'm happy to go along with that. There's the requisite number of twists and not everyone lives happily, or even at all, ever after.
The audience gets to do a reasonable amount of laughing, some at the odd concoctions Paige serves to her guests that serve as the play's point of difference from most dinner-table dramas (if not from episodes of Heston's Feasts), some of the oh-isn't-she-being-a-bitch variety, but far too many at the sprinkling of F-words and C-bombs I thought we might have been able to cope with without giggling by now.
The performances are fine in an off-the-rack sort of way - Davis' Sian is the one character you mightn't have seen many times before - and Cherry and Suidgeest spin them around the Lazy Susan in the centre of the stage adroitly enough.
In the end Dinner is professionally prepared and served. It's just hard to fathom why anyone bothered to reheat it.
Dinner ends on March 29.
