At Dinner, ACT Hub Development, ACT Hub, 9-11 Feb 2023

 The "dinner play", where characters sit down in a restaurant and hash out their issues over a meal and a beverage, has a long and productive history, It's a  simple genre keeping its characters in circulation around one table, occasionally interrupted by a waiter at strategic times, driven largely by the twists and turns of the conversation. 

"At Dinner" is part of ACT Hub's development program, and it's good to see them getting into looking at the next generation of Canberra creatives - even if, as with all work-in-development, it's a mixture of the good and the "needs thinking about further". 

To start with the good, writer Rebecca Duke is skilled at managing the sensation of "small talk with big thoughts behind it", playing with the nature of the restaurant table-for-two as a space - simultaneously an intimate private space and somewhere awkwardly public where your conversation can suddenly become the subject of everyone else's interest. Director Holly Johnson keeps the pace going, and the three performers, Thea Jade as the contemplative diner, Timothy Cusack as her more verbose and egotistical companion, and Nakiya Xyrakis as the waitress who gets brought into their awkward banter, all find moments of light and shade in their performance. Nell Fraser's costume design uses an interesting mix of red and black to give the costumes unity and individuality. 

In the less good - this is a play with a twist, and while I don't want to reveal the twist, I'm not entirely sure the choices behind the twist are necessarily the wisest. It's playing with risky stereotypes without sufficient care to avoid the more noxious elements of those stereotypes - while I'm sure this has been thought about in the production process a great deal, I don't think the production team found their way successfully out of the trap they've set themselves.

I do think young writers need to see their work in front of an audience - it's an exposing thing to do but it's important that they get a chance to use their voice, (even if I don't necessarily love everything they're doing with that voice). Given this has a short run, but most of the performances are sold out, there's clearly an audience very much interested in giving this a go (despite the stereotype of Canberra audiences not coming to new work, the Hub has clearly built up enough of a following who will give it a taste test at the right price).