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Dish of the Day

Author: Stuart Ardern

Information

Date
16th November 2012
Society
The Minstead Players
Venue
Minstead Village Hall
Type of Production
Play
Director
Michael Hutton

At Dish of the Day I witnessed something I’d not seen before when, during the interval, a member of the audience borrowed a prop from the stage.  (The prop in question was an inflatable gentleman, and he was returned to his rightful place before the start of the second act.)  I suppose it’s one of the risks of an open stage presentation - and this was a very tastefully presented set; a small restaurant, with its tables spilling onto the apron stage, and upstage flats showing the view out of a large picture window (excellent scene painting by Mary Hyde).

There was a lot of fun in the show, but I felt that there wasn’t quite enough depth in the script to sustain a full-length piece.  The basic scenario is a hapless waitress (Stevie Parker)  trying to deal with three groups of customers.  This was done with a lot of physical comedy as she contrived to injure herself in almost every scene.  (I felt one small piece of the physical comedy was underplayed.  The waitress used a broom to attack a rat.  This was done in mime, and, I think, would have been funnier with the startling sound of the broom hitting the floor - albeit with some risk of damage to the stage!)  At one table, there’s a couple on a date arranged by an agency, then there’s a middle-aged couple dragging a reluctant, ancient mother out to dine, and finally a determinedly drunken hen party.  The show doesn’t afford much direct communication between the three tables, but there was one piece of excellent indirect interaction, when one member of each party took a phone call - and the halves of three separate conversations interwove.

It was the hen party, of course, who had brought the inflatable gentleman with them.  The trio (Becky Dolan, Susannah Bond and Jo Clarke) played the drunken revelry very well, along with some good stage business, including the accidental theft of a set of false teeth, but I felt that the emotional points - the bride-to-be gradually realises that marriage is the wrong direction for her - needed more emphasis to bring out the pathos.  The hen party were also responsible for the arrival of the policeman (Patrick Dolan) in the finale - though his role was given away by the programme cover.  (I assume that the writer intended this to be a disguised joke.)

The mix of roles at the other tables were a bit uneven, with Caroline Biggin and Mary Hyde really playing understated straight roles to other people’s comedy (and the grumpiness of Bill Pitman’s Henry).  The comedy was very well done, with Isabel Yeo having a whale of a time as the decrepit mother, determinedly not enjoying herself, and Alistair Banks’s delivery of the verbal and physical humour was spot-on.  One can’t help thinking that his date, Julie (Mary Hyde), would have been better off with speed-dating.  She could have saved a lot of time by taking an instant dislike to Mike - a character written and played as someone who could have bored for England.

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