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Donald Margulies's 1998 comedy drama looks like it’s about the break-up of a marriage – but it’s really about the break-up of a friendship. Two comfortable middle-class American couples, who holiday in Martha’s Vineyard and enjoy good food and good wine while their kids play, are rocked when Tom cheats on Beth. Karen and Gabe are horrified, and the first half is a battle of picking sides. As the play progresses, however, it’s less a study in guilt and blame, and more a dissection of how friendships work: what fossilised parts we play, and how we want to see our own life choices mirrored and validated in others.
Tom Attenborough’s production is itself highly comfortable with this familiar-feeling material; he enables Margulies’s dialogue to sound both utterly naturalistic and very funny. Running jokes about Gabe and Karen’s ridiculous fetishising of food (a polenta cake keeps interrupting break-up arguments) haven’t dated a jot. And if Hari
Dhillon as Tom and Finty Williams as Beth never quite look like a convincing couple - she so highly-strung! he so suave! - Shaun Dooley and Sara Stewart absolutely nail Gabe and Karen as the ultimate smug marrieds.
David Woodhead’s set – white wood and chrome kitchen; herbs in a row, just so – sets the scene confidently. But the problem with 'Dinner with Friends' is that setting: it’s hard to care about the slightly disrupted lives of the well-off. Margulies won the Pulitzer Prize for it – baffling, for while the play may be convincing in its portrayal of relationships, its insights are hardly ground-breaking and its form unremarkable. Not a bad evening by any means, but about as essential as a second slice of polenta cake.
BY: HOLLY WILLIAMS