Review: TABLE 17, Starring Marisha Wallace

Before Table 17 begins, a voice over the tannoy announces that audience interaction is encouraged, “like in panto”. It’s a good thing they warned us, because Douglas Lyons’ play is trying so hard to be a participatory experience that its core emotional truths are being lost along the way.

The play, which has had previous productions off-Broadway and in LA, is set over the course of one evening, the first time former couple Jada and Dallas (Marisha Wallace and Jamael Westman) have met since their split. Dallas has invited Jada for dinner for reasons that begin ambiguous and remain that way, and feelings on both sides are clearly unresolved.

Wallace and Westman deliver monologues processing the twists and turns of their relationship directly to the audience, as though in a group chat with their best friends; they are warm, approachable performers with a knack for Lyons’ confessional style. Both actors have storied careers in musical theatre (this is, in fact, Wallace’s non-musical London debut), which is evident in their fluid movement, pulling themselves in and out of each other’s orbit in a manner carefully choreographed by director Zhailon Levingston.

Jada and Dallas’ conversations at dinner reveal sensitive observations from Lyons on how exes interact with each other, especially when there’s clearly still love there. But he’s far too quick to follow these up with a crude joke, or a sidelong glance to the audience. The mask is never lifted, and we never get a full sense of who these people are and why they fell in love; flashbacks depicting Jada and Dallas’ past jump straight from their first meeting in a bar to their engagement two years later.

This breakneck pace might make one anticipate a more complex, drawn-out narrative of the couple’s eventual breakup. But when that penny drops, it’s an anticlimactic cliche revolving around struggles with work-life balance and the temptation of infidelity – Jada’s feelings for her cocksure colleague Eric (Michael Rishawn) are unconvincing. The idea for a play that unpicks the past and interrogates where a relationship went wrong has been done before and better, notably in the musical The Last Five Years.

But Jada and Dallas’ chemistry always feels believable, and there are further seeds of interesting ideas. Rishawn has an additional role as River, a single, gay, chronically lonely waiter at the restaurant, who steals the show both as comic relief and as a useful outsider’s perspective on the protagonists’ relationship, a particularly sardonic audience avatar. Amy Jane Cook’s neon-lit set is glamorous and maximalist, with the plush booth Jada and Dallas occupy at the restaurant rotating and morphing into a bar, a sofa, the back of an aeroplane.

One comes away from Table 17 with a sense that no one was a villain in Jada and Dallas’ breakup, a sign of a well-written conflict that Lyons ought to have explored further. But there’s also the feeling that we’re watching a facsimile, actors retelling the story of their breakup rather than actively living those emotions. Less chitchat with audience members would enable the show to reach them on a more profound level.

Table 17 plays at the Kiln Theatre until 24 October

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