Serving a feast of revenge

Revenge is several dinner-party dishes served hot and tasting foul in this witty, black fantasy about a married hostess with a talent to abuse - and for self-abuse. By the time primordial soup and alarming apocalypse of (live) lobster have been set before the guests, a path has been laid for a social disaster worse than that endured by the Macbeths when Banquo missed the supper-party.

There remains, therefore, plenty to savour in Moira Buffini's Dinner, first served up by the National in 2002, particularly when the comedy of bad manners scales heights of bitchiness and embarrassment. But the play's defects, which critics discovered last year, loom clearer on a West End stage. And Fiona Buffini's powerfully acted, over-realistic production does not disguise Dinner's repetitive structure and tone.

The plot, and it is a plot not just in a narrative sense, centres upon a dinner-party thrown by Harriet Walter's Paige, whose red dress hints at the rage that Miss Walter keeps suppressed in a delectable comic performance. The party ostensibly celebrates the publication of a book by Paige's jargon-toting husband, Lars, that sounds like a charlatan's recipe for existentialism, without the moral ingredients. In tones of vapid, clichéd pseudery, Nicholas Farrell's sinister, charlatan Lars and his friend, Hal, a microbiologist, discuss England as if it were going literally and spiritually down the drain.

Buffini's satire at the expense of would-be intellectuals and of Penny Downie's delightfully earnest hippie artist, who has exposed her MP lover's genitals in a picture entitled The Member For Camberwell Green, is, however, incidental. The play's real theatrical business depends upon Paige's plan to make her dinnerparty, with its sinister waiter, into a marriage-finale. Voice, strangulated and quavering, manner edgy and tense, Miss Walter delivers acidulated snubs to her guests and husband in the tones of minor royalty putting down the middle-classes as if they had been picked up in error. She does, though, need to show late signs of grief and breakdown.

Unfortunately, after a stranded van-driver calls and the atmosphere darkens, Dinner dwindles into repetitive rounds of Paige's malice. Miss Buffini has rewritten the finale and the new resolution makes her failure to explore the reasons for Paige's melodramatic, self-destructive revenge scheme and the couple's mutual hatred more glaring. Dinner is real fun but thematically and dramatically undeveloped.

Dinnerladies