Review: BINAURAL DINNER DATE, Stephen Lawrence Gallery

Please note: this review contains spoilers. 

Birds do it. Bees do it. Even educated fleas do it. Let’s do it, let’s partake in Binaural Dinner Date, a highly personal experience which uses audio technology and biting wit to lay bare our own foundational thoughts about love, connection and partnership.

This is not a show for everyone, especially those who like their theatre to come with a thick fourth wall or are, as per the fair warning given to us, “fundamentally opposed to falling in love”. Sociopaths, psychopaths and those who choose to stand in cycle paths will struggle with the level of empathy and self-awareness required here when intimately positioned face to face with probably the most complex creation on the planet: another human being.

Currently situated in Stockwell Cafe in the University of Greenwich’s Stephen Lawrence Gallery, this playfully intense tête-à-tête from ZU UK has been staged elsewhere around London and is revived in conjunction with the one-on-one VR-enabled Within Touching Distance and the interactive ghost hunt-slash-radio show Radio Ghost.

On arrival, every participant is paired up with another at their own table and, through games and other co-operative exercises, find out more about each other and what a possible future together could look like. There’s no escaping the gaze of the person opposite as you go through this journey of discovery. Over the course of 75 minutes, expect to be inspected at close quarters - and not just physically. 

The first round of questions are innocuous enough and establish various similarities (in my case, we’re both here to offer a written opinion and both work in IT). We’re offered a shot of something deliciously alcoholic before engaging in some more simple games that establish our competitive natures (I win the staring contest but only just). The winners get to ask some slightly more searching posers, the losers get to think of responses that make them sound highly mysterious yet deliciously interesting. 

It is when we are asked to pop in a pair of binaural earphones that things get decidedly more fun. The voice we hear takes us through a dating scenario, telling us what to say and do with some instructions strictly for one side of the table only. Like ventriloquist dummies, we go along with this, saying the most banal of lines and pushing the intimacy envelope a little further. Scenarios with comic overtones but romantic resonance are played out with small Lego figures and toy animals.

The further we go down this rabbit hole, the more our waiter becomes involved. After showing us to our table and offering us a drink, he becomes our interlocutor and gamesmaster, then a third wheel who pries more from us about our desires and needs from life and finally a character looking to connect with passersby. We go from partakers to voyeurs, witnesses to the power of not just love but also not-love, that emotional state of painful longing which has the power to ruthlessly corrode our soul.

Whether being paired with another critic affected my experience of Binaural Dinner Date is debatable. On the one hand, this led to a more relaxed conversation knowing that neither of us was here looking for The One; on the other, we swerved the questions demanded of us around favourite books and other icebreakers and ended up talking far more about recent theatre than two sane people on a first date generally would. 

Immersive theatre has come into its own this year with intense and intimate productions like this and Within Touching Distance (also from ZU-UK) proving to be as innovative and exciting as bigger shows like Phantom Peak, Monarch Theatre or Rumble In the Jungle. This is despite a dearth of funding for this art form: 55% of shows are at least partly self-funded by the creatives and 35% of new work is paid for through the success of earlier works.

Either way, this is a remarkably intelligent and mature piece of meta-theatre that gets under the skin and inside the head. Even with its occasional throwaway gags and cynical edge, it poses many thought-provoking questions about the human condition.

Binaural Dinner Date continues until 17 December.

Photo credit: ZU-UK

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