Review: Dinner, Omnibus Theatre

What are you to make of a meal where the starter delights, the main course disappoints, and dessert leaves you cold? It constitutes a conflicted dining experience – and much the same can be said of Dinner at Omnibus Theatre.

Set within Paige’s (Matsume Kai) traditional Japanese kotatsu dining room, the play gathers five unsuspecting guests for an evening of humiliation disguised as hospitality. Through a succession of controversial courses and provocative party games, old resentments are exposed, and scores settled. There is undeniable potential in Moira Buffini’s zingy script, packed with acidic one-liners that still bite more than twenty years after the play’s premiere, like “The Member for Camberwell Green” – a gleefully absurd jab at Wynne’s (Rebecca Joy Wilson) politician husband after his genitals appear in an art exhibition, that land with genuine comic force. The cast consistently finds the humour in Buffini’s writing, proving how contemporary the play’s cynicism still feels.

Yet the production is undermined by choices that blunt its tension rather than sharpen it. A conversation between old friends Lars (Matt Mowat) and Hal (Oliver Maynard), for instance, is staged with both men pacing endlessly around the dining room, draining the exchange of intimacy and making the scene feel oddly self-conscious. The sound design (Conor O’Kane & David Fairs) proves similarly distracting, with music that frequently swells too loudly beneath dialogue, while some cues feel tonally mismatched, most notably ceremonial music underscoring a pivotal discussion about killing and eating lobster. The climactic confrontation of the play’s conclusion loses much of its menace when the Waiter (Talitha Christina) appears to chase the guests towards the exit rather than trap them inside the room. 

Performance-wise, there is much to admire. Kai delivers a fiercely intelligent and manipulative Paige, relishing every opportunity to unsettle her guests, while as her husband, Lars, Mowat captures a smug hypocrisy with pleasing naturalism. Wilson is particularly strong as Wynne, whose self-proclaimed eroticism barely conceals her deep prudishness. Maynard’s Hal is more unevenly realised. The performance is often very funny, but the character fluctuates so abruptly between intellectual, libertine and moral crusader that coherence is lost.

The production itself follows a similar trajectory. Flashes of brilliance are interrupted by increasingly uneven pacing. The first half is considerably stronger than the second. A dinner-party game in which each guest must present on an uncomfortable subject drags badly, with the audience left waiting for each contribution in turn. Theo Woolford injects fresh energy upon Mike’s arrival, particularly as the guests become fascinated by his working-class background, but the tension generated there is never fully sustained after the interval.

There are still moments of flair. The lighting design (Beth Thomas, O’Kane & Fairs) handles transitions elegantly, even if the repeated reorientation of the dining table between scenes feels unnecessary and distracting. Christina’s near-silent Waiter is an eerie presence throughout, dancing through the space with unsettling precision. A sudden dance break to ‘5,6,7,8’ by Steps is bizarre, but undeniably entertaining.

Buffini’s play is clearly satirising the moral emptiness of affluent modern life, though this production never fully commits to either psychological depth or outright absurdity. The result is a drama that generates occasional shocks and sharp laughs, but little lasting impact. Once the dinner party ends, there is surprisingly little left to digest.

Writer: Moira Buffini
Directors: David Fairs & Conor O’Kane
Set & Costume Designer: Tara Usher
Production Stage Manager: Beth Thomas
Lighting Design: Beth Thomas, Conor O’Kane & David Fairs
Sound Design: Conor O’Kane & David Fairs
Producer: Matsume Kai
Presented by Kai Creative Studio

Dinner plays at Omnibus Theatre until Sunday 24 May.