Review: Dinner is Coming

Style: Sumptuous Parody with Food
Where: The Vaults
When: Until 2nd June

Rating: 5/5

Immersive Dinner theatre can be hit and miss. Sometimes great fun, sometimes a disaster. Regular readers will remember I had considerable issues with the staging, content and overall design of a previous Vaults production Divine Proportions.

So it was with a little trepidation that I approached Dinner is Coming. I worried that there would not be enough immersive elements surrounding the food and drink to make it a worthy night out. I needn’t have.

From your arrival in the throne room, the production keeps you busy engaged and guessing. And you get to sit on the Ironish Throne.

The action is constant. Shanine Salmon and myself were lucky enough to be recruited as ‘tits’ for Varicose (Liam Flemming) and had whole extra tasks to complete which made us happy as lambs.

Like most dinner theatre this balanced discussion with your table with the action surrounding you, but here I never felt I missed central parts of the action and there was a lot of one on one interaction with the characters that help you move on your storyline as well as getting a really in-depth sense of the action.

There were played out scenes too between every course of the excellent food. Largely dependent on where the audience had got to in their mission of electing the next ruler of Easteros and finding out who killed Jafferey.

The hardest part of the show, for me, was keeping track of the parody names. Remembering to call him Jimmy, her Kirsty, Her Carly. In the end, I quite often simply refered to them in my head and otherwise as “not Jamie” etc. But that was all part of the tongue in cheek fun. Some of the parody elements were a little tortured, but only in that fantastically campy British way that makes this kind of thing so much fun.

There’s so much to do, see and experience in this sumptuous production that I cannot recommend it highly enough. I had a hoot from arrival to leaving. The food was good, the show better. Dinner Is Coming is an absolute blast.