Dante or Die’s resurrected 2013 show feels like a sweet throwback to the glory days of the site-specific theatre era: that is to say, plays that are written in response to the specific, non-theatre building they’re staged in.
In many ways the precursor to the boom in larger scale immersive theatre shows, site-specific work is no longer massively modish, but Dante or Die have kept the flame going for 20 years now. Much of their work is fringier and more radically intimate than I Do. But it’s kind of the company’s greatest hit, originally staged under the auspices of the Almeida. It’s a series of sweetly earnest interconnecting playlets about the build up to a wedding that is staged in a hotel, in this case the Malmaisson, and genuinely wouldn’t make sense in a non-hotel setting near the Barbican (which has programmed this revival).
It’s hard to know exactly where to begin when describing the show, which was created by the company’s Daphna Attias and Terry O’Donovan and written by Chloe Moss. That’s because where it begins varies. The audience is divided into six groups - each with their own usher - and will therefore see the six vignettes that make up I Do in a completely different order to any other group.
The stories are self contained but with some crossover. Manish Gandhi’s nervy best man Joe, Geoff Atwell’s wheelchair-bound grandfather-of-the-bride Gordon, and Alice Brittain’s lairy sister-of-the-bride Lizzy never leave their own rooms and only appear in a single section each. The others move around to varying degrees, and though each vignette is coherent, the stories of some individual characters are only clear after seeing multiple playlets, notably Tessie Orange-Turner‘s highly strung maid of honour Abigail and Fred Fergus’s brother of the bride Nick, both essentially peripatetic figures.
Meanwhile, show co-creator O’Donovan plays a sort of mystical hotel cleaner, who touches the characters’ lives in sundry ways and whose repetition of the same scene in the corridor is used to indicate that time has moved back and that all these stories take place at the same time.
If Attias’s production was just laid out on a stage in linear fashion you’d call it a tender but soapy snapshot of an extended family in dramatic flux. It’s not just groom Tunde (Dauda Ladejobi) and bride Georgina (Carla Langley) who have wedding day nerves, it’s everyone, for varyingly dramatic reasons, but really it’s proper EastEnders territory.
This is all considerably aided by the fact that we’re in small rooms, in close proximity to the cast - we can hear every sigh, feel every twinge of doubt. (The magic cleaner stuff I’m afraid I found pretty irritating).
But it’s really a logistical triumph: the way the six stories sync up is impressive: there are all sorts of satisfying ‘oooooh’ moments as it’s revealed to us what a character went and did when they left a room we were in previously. The ending scene, where the cast do a sort of outtakes reel of the bits of the show they performed in the hotel corridor while we were in the rooms, is a fun little victory lap.
Do great logistics make great theatre? To an extent, sure. But I think maybe the inherently cyclical nature of the show leaves it lacking a great final act. I’m not really sure what that would be (it would seem a bit naff to actually stage the wedding) but there’s a meandering quality to it all that leaves you hanging a bit. Entertaining as the last scene is, it adds nothing to the story. But I Do is a little gem: maybe Dante or Die are the last company going that still describe themselves as site specific, but they really make it work.
