★★★ Review: Ionesco / Dinner at the Smiths @Riverside Studios
A play about a dinner party that you are invited to
You are welcomed into Ionesco / Dinner at the Smiths before the formal performance has even begun, and those early interactions are some of the evening’s strongest pleasures. There is an immediate sense of playful invitation, with the audience encouraged into the spirit of the event before being led inside. The crowd on the night I attended seemed notably eccentric in dress and, largely, of an older generation, which in a way suited the atmosphere: this felt less like a standard night at the theatre and more like entry into a curious private ritual.
The setting helps establish that mood. We are ushered into a room where a table awaits, laid with a red runner, a printed menu and, intriguingly, a blindfold. We are offered a choice of red or white wine, and the sense of ceremony continues as an emcee settles us in. Even before the text begins in earnest, the production has created a social space that is slightly off-centre, gently absurd, and knowingly theatrical.
I came to the piece without really knowing the backstory of the works on which it is based, and in some ways that may have helped. Rather than trying to map each scene against its Ionesco source, I experienced it as a sequence of surreal encounters and repetitions, where meaning is felt as much as followed. Central to this is the couple who seem always destined to meet: same interests, same place, same second-class train carriage, always. Their encounter has the circular, faintly ludicrous logic of dream or ritual, and the production leans into that with confidence. As the evening unfolds, we also meet younger versions of the couple, which adds another layer of reflection, memory and doubling to a piece already fascinated by repetition and identity.
The overall effect is surreal, but not alienating. There is humour in the stylisation, and pleasure in being asked to surrender to its strange internal logic rather than resist it. The production seems less interested in delivering a neat narrative than in conjuring a social and emotional landscape where coincidence, habit, language and performance keep folding back on themselves.
A memorable Avant garde show but I do feel could have gone further into its playfulness.
