Deliciously dark dinner

Impressive: Catherine McCormack as Sian

I doubt if many plays in theatrical history offer a more melodramatic dinner-party than the one thrown during Moira Buffini's weirdly humorous play. And the word "thrown" hardly does justice to the physical boisterousness of the occasion, the verbal bitchery and the menacing menu.

What begins as a blistering comedy of manners, a satire at the expense of smug middle-class folk, soon begins to take leave of realism's security. Dinner, finely directed by Miss Buffini's sister, Fiona, and beautifully acted by the entire cast, advances into the riskier realms of black farce and revenge melodrama. This stylistic gear-change betrays a weakness at the heart of Dinner: I fancy that Miss Buffini is really trying to convey the despair and rage of someone for whom love and marriage have gone to the dogs. This theme is rather lost, the serious pain submerged in extravagancies and lurid absurdities.

Harriet Walter excels at playing neurotic, upper-middle class women who have frost in their souls and personalities steeped in vinegar and gall. She is in her delectable, comic element as Paige, a power-hostess all dressed in livid red, finger-nails the colour of blood, terse voice strangulated. Miss Buffini's satirical

arrows hit a series of easy, pretentious targets: rich Paige's dinner-party, to celebrate a new best seller about the "psychological apocalypse" by distant, sardonic husband Lars (Nicholas Farrell), is a feast of bizarre cooking with symbolically freighted courses that include living lobsters and one insulting, raw cabbage.

The atmosphere is nicely fraught with intimations of male sexual treachery. Paige's best friend has been abandoned by the scientist Hal who arrives with new wife Sian (impressive Catherine McCormack). The hippy artist, Penny Downie's Wynne, on whom Lars casts interested eyes, has just been dumped by her MP partner.

Miss Downie offers a lovely portrait of earnest hippy soulfulness and Miss Walter spreads a little malice with beautiful, comic disdain. But after a working-class stranger is admitted, Dinner takes a turn for the horrifying and Paige's revenge-plot drags this amusing play to a preposterous climax.

Dinner

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