DINNER. To 7 August.
Tour
DINNER
by Moira Buffini
Tour to 7 August 2004
Runs 1hr 50min No interval
Review: Timothy Ramsden 12 July at Richmond Theatre
Would it all have seemed different if this were a first viewing?This play's cast, wondering about their audience, might guess who's coming to Dinner. Audiences might wonder what this play is up to, with its high-flying cultural, media characters on a West London millionaire's row, faced with Primordial Soup, Apocalypse of Lobster and Frozen Waste as dessert. The Buffinis keep us guessing till late. Strangely, despite having seen the play in its first location, at the National Theatre's temporary Loft, a new viewing from the rear circle at Richmond (fine view but purgatorial leg-room) left me uncertain in placing it: a variant Virginia Woolf or a stylishly oblique thriller?
In the Loft's low-roofed, one-level intimacy (with a different cast) it was an intense experience, each character a seriously considered individual. In the larger space, with appropriately geared-up acting style, the script seems more self-consciously witty, the characters the types found in middle-class satires on quality' TV in their self-absorption, pomposity and cruelty.
Least so is Gaby Roslin's Sian, the TV face humiliated when husband Hal introduction her as a news babe'. Director Fiona Buffini (also director in the Lift) often seems to leave her uninvolved at the stage side. Or maybe it's the playwright underwriting, the actor on a small stage finding it easier to keep the character in our consciousness.
Though outsider Mike, the young van-driver who crashes the party, still implies a threat at times, he now seems simply a foil to bourgeois pretentiousness. At the other end of the scale, Patrick Ryecart, the husband whose new popular philosophy book is supposedly honoured by the meal (its actual purpose becomes clearer course by course) is pure, confident-voiced arrogance with no chink of humanity.
Stephanie Beacham does suggest the pain beneath Paige's icy poise but hardly the searing agony Harriet Walter brought. Different performers, or a different space? A potentially popular success shouldn't be confined forever to a hundred-seater; but does a larger theatre mean the play's stresses are exposed, having been covered by the thrill of close-up acting intensity, or is it that a good play's less well-done? If so, then given it's the same director why so?
Paige: Stephanie Beacham
Lars: Patrick Ryecart
Wynne: Louise Jameson
Hal: Crispin Redman
Sian: Gaby Roslin
Mike: Liam Smith
The Waiter: Mark Hayford
Director: Fiona Buffini
Designer: Rachel Blues
Lighting: Mark Henderson
Sound: Rich Walsh
Fight director: Malcolm Ranson
2004-07-13 15:21:20