Last night in Rector’s Café, where I never before expected to be held rapt by a single play, I saw thirteen, my poor copy of Paradise Lost lying neglected in my bag all the while. In other words, I very happily traded one multichapter epic for another, and if Table for Two had included twelve plays, one for each book of Paradise Lost, this introduction would be a lot cleaner. Fortunately I got the whole thirteen, and what a reward was each—so here’s a monstrously long review!
 |
| ID: Ryan Cunningham and Ava Cecile Reid Samans. Credit: Hanna Sabu. |
Table for Two, a People You Know production, consists of a series of student-written duologues all set in the same small-town fancy restaurant during the lunch and dinner hours. The set is minimalistic: four tables, candles, wine glasses. (Elegant overall, though the gingham tablecloths evoked for me, nostalgically, something closer to a family-owned Italian restaurant in the Midwest.) Sedate jazz piano plays softly throughout. Nighttime on Market Street through the huge window of the café provides the backdrop, with people passing by outside and sometimes glancing through the window just as if it were a real restaurant. Before the show, I had the chance to speak with the directors, Lexie Dykes and Freddie Greenwood, who said that this effect is intentional. Freddie told me, “We wanted it to be like you’re actually viewing a dining experience. You will see people enter the restaurant and be seated by waiters and have an order taken while another duologue is being delivered.” Lexie added, “We very much discussed it as a fly-on-the-wall type show. We definitely want to play with the audience feeling like they’re overhearing different parts of conversations”. This is one of the coolest aspects of the show—the other actors existing in the space of the duologue currently being performed, reacting to outbursts from other tables, quietly carrying on their own conversations while the two waiters (Ava Cecile Reid Samans and Ryan Cunningham) weave around them, overseeing the scene. Lexie told me that they intended the waiters’ presence “to link all the pieces” and they do, though I’m glad that they also get two duologues of their own: the slight, delightful “Waiters Waiting” by Isy Platt and the longer “Workplace Gossip” by Oceane Taylor, which closes Act I. Ava and Ryan have a realistic chemistry as coworkers whose friendship was forged in allegiance against their boss and who hype each other up regardless of what they do or say. Ryan portrays his waiter as judgmental but fundamentally innocent, popping up amusingly to interrupt the couple in Maisie Michaelson-Friend’s “Ready to Order?” with the titular line. Ava’s waiter is also gossipy, good-natured and competent, but has a prodigiously complicated and hilariously depressing relationship history, and at several points in the show she stands against the window in the background of a conversation, arms crossed, chewing gum as if she would like to bite someone’s hand off. If we weren’t in Rector’s, or if this show were real life, she’d be smoking a cigarette instead; but her gaze and bearing nevertheless manage to convey boredom, contempt, and longing. I was so pleased when she finally found a promising romantic prospect. (I’m obliged to celebrate that it’s a woman, too.)
Like actual waiters, Ava and Ryan have access to areas off-limits to customers, and so they make the fullest use of the space of the café, appearing from and disappearing into its darkened regions. The lighting on the ‘stage’ proper is by contrast white, even surgical, so that I sometimes felt like I was witnessing an operation instead of a conversation—suitable for a show whose conversations dissect relationships with varying mixtures of straightforward comedy, irony, and pathos.
I have no idea where to start with the rest of the conversations, so to avoid a chronological summary (boring!), I’ll start late, in the dinner hour, with Aidan Monks’ “Don’t Think”. The guests in this duologue are an aristocratic couple (those RP accents which I, American, still struggle to believe are real) named Margaret and Septimus, which of course makes me think of Mrs Dalloway, though this Septimus is slightly—slightly!—more psychologically sound. It’s just that he was excited by a “tiff” over his wife’s “improper” manners when eating an undercooked chicken kiev at a dinner party (Sallies dining hall reference?), and he’s desperate to tiff again. Daisy Paterson is a very convincing posh repressed old woman in a forty-year marriage, wearing her blazer like a straitjacket (credit to Lilly Gordon and Elouisa Cairns for the production’s subtly revealing costumes), surprised at and then delighted with how improperly she is capable of behaving. Meanwhile, Geordie Coles plays Septimus like he could be any age, Oxbridge aesthete or the louche, probably white-haired “Falstaffian” socialite that he is. The immaturity of the very rich! Watching him gesture, I kept thinking, If only this production didn’t demand that most of its actors stay in their chairs, he’d be an excellent physical comedian. And then the play actually does devolve—or evolve—into a great and well-earned piece of physical comedy, finally consummating the show’s pervading fascination with the connection between food, or eating, and desire.
.jpg) |
| ID: Hannah Savage and Eddie Williams. Credit: Hanna Sabu. |
“Like a Rat up a Drainpipe”, by Zeynep Kayra Yildirim, is also concerned with deprivation and satiety. It’s interesting how this and other prevalent themes become apparent in the course of the production even though the duologues were written independently—perhaps a consequence of the premise? Callum Wardman-Browne plays a guy who can’t quite get the gist of his girlfriend (Sofia Hattiangadi); his face and tone move from bemused to resentful at her disappointment as he visibly stages a hurt and hostile retreat. She takes his near-misses as indicators that their differences have become chasmic. Instead of a breakup, the awkwardness builds steadily into manic comedy, and Sofia really sells her character’s climactic outburst, so that I totally believed in her urgent need to be a rat, sharp-toothed, devouring whatever she liked.
.jpg) |
| ID: Aubrey McCance and Scarlett Tew. Credit: Hanna Sabu. |
In Maisie Michaelson-Friend’s “Laying the Groundwork”, a woman, played by Emily Christaki, endures a first date with a gravel connoisseur (Matthew Clegg), who gesticulates so passionately as he monologues about the stuff that she looks worried he’s going to hit her in the face. She also looks, as the date progresses, miserable and increasingly drunk, staggering to the bathroom at one point but miraculously returning to the table afterwards. The gravel is one surreal element; that she puts up with him for so long is another—and Clegg is winningly oblivious. I actually feel like the combative married couple in Elena Koestel Santamaria’s “Do Us Part” are having a better time. The wife (Imogen Griffiths) is fierce and dismissive, and her husband (Aidan Monks) can’t help but mock her, raising his eyebrows subtly to do so. Both seem grimly delighted by the exchange, and you get the feeling that they’d still like to give their marriage a go—if only for the chance at another biting, flirtatious battle.
“Off Script” and “Ready to Order?” are both interested in theatre, performance, and being a spectator, which really resonated with me as someone sitting in an audience. “Off Script” is about two small-time mimes-slash-clowns, played by Liza Vasilyeva and Tatiana Kneale, debating whether it’s better to look at or ignore your audience. Liza and Tatiana are very relatable as neurotic best friends who enjoy analysing one another, and the waiters mistake them for a couple, which is not uncalled for: “before we kiss—” “LOVE that scene”. In “Ready to Order?”, a longtime couple (Ava Pegg-Davies and Luke Robinson) eavesdrop on the other tables in the restaurant, comparing themselves favourably to another couple—look how performative they are, we’d never be so sloppily in love. Because I’d just spent the past two hours eavesdropping on dinner conversations myself, I sympathised with them both. Luke makes his character’s struggle to redirect the conversation without being cringe (God forbid) very palpable, and Ava lends an evasive, self-protective quality to her character’s ironic observations. Both exhibit in their smooth banter an obvious fear of exposure, which is endearing, especially because, in a show like Table for Two, resistance to exposure is futile. There might still be standing room in the back—there was last night—so go put yourself on display to anybody walking down Market Street; it’s good to be part of the show when the show is as good as this.
By Eliza (she/her)