There’s no question of the must-see show of last year: it was A Girl Gets Naked in This, People You Know Productions’ collection of sex themed monologues. It was a raging success. The dialogues were equal parts heart wrenching and funny. They spoke to the deep-welled frustration of being a woman, and it sold out every night. The big question: how to follow it up?
Enter Table for Two, a collection of duologues themed around a restaurant. The idea seems promising. After all, what unites humanity more than needing to eat? Surely all kinds of characters will wander through these doors. And wander they do. But something has been lost in the transition from bedroom to high street, and replaced with a tendency for caricature that strips away the emotional core A Girl Gets Naked in This managed to develop.
McCance and Tew showcase the show’s emotional core (Credit: People You Know).
Last year’s show was in a townhouse bedroom—shockingly intimate. This time, the company has chosen an all-too-familiar location for most students: the glass-fronted seating area of Rector's Cafe. Every chair the Union has to offer has been crammed into the space to create a stage—to accommodate the predictably massive demand for tickets, seats have been added to the side of the actors as well, despite the show clearly designed primarily for a forward-facing audience.
Yet, for the most part, this unusual arrangement works—just as Lupo's and the Bell Pettigrew Museum were transformed into stages, so too have spotlights been lugged into the Union and the windows illuminated for the street to see. The only downside is the acoustics. The extended front of the new Union building creates a vortex for sound to shoot up and disappear into, away from the ears of the audience.
In the centre of this commotion are a handful of tables (for two, of course), covered with checked tablecloths and plates of food. Actors come and go, settling down at their table long before their dialogues start and leaving after. The setup is interspersed with Ava Reid and Ryan Cunningham's waiters, who floats around with dishes and credit card machines.
The pair bookend the show with a group of dialogues that firmly entrench the audience in the struggles of serving (take it from someone who's lived it)—at least until they start admitting to slapstick errors like leaving dishes on the floor for unsuspecting customers to slip on. It's an odd juxtaposition of tone that cheapens the show instead of elevating it—a problem which the entirety of Table for Two struggles with.
The different writers mean the tone oscillates widely, from the serious to the humorous to the deeply bizarre. This is an especially pronounced issue in the first act. The most egregious head-scratcher is Loulou Sloss's ‘Tooth About Love’, which toes—and often stumbles over—the line between sort of funny and off-puttingly strange.
There are a handful of fine scenes about dysfunctional couples and feeling so unmoored you consider becoming a nun, and then a baffling one where a woman starts moaning about how the world of Pixar’s Ratatouille is the one we should all aspire to (‘Like a Rat Up a Drainpipe). The atmosphere is that of an improv show (perhaps not surprising, given the show’s physical proximity and writing team is closely tied to Blind Mirth). A dramatic swing could happen at any time, and you have to hope you’re prepared.
That’s not to say there’s nothing genuinely funny in the first act. The standout of the half is easily 'LinkedIn' by Daisy Paterson, a laugh-out-loud lunch break between a real estate lawyer on the brink and his nepo-baby intern—though perhaps I only found it so funny because I spend approximately one third of my time writing cover letters about how my life's dream is to maximise shareholder value (third year comes at you fast, kids). It’s a delight, and its penultimate position in the line-up leaves the audience buoyed for the intermission.
‘LinkedIn’ is the comedic highlight. (Credit: People You Know).
The second act is much stronger. Its scenes are a moving blend of the sincere and light-hearted that make it a joy to watch. Aubury McCance and Scarlett Tew are excellent in Dyaln Swain’s ‘The Minute Details’, a horribly awkward scene of waiting for the rest of a birthday party to arrive. As this is a collection of duologues, you already know how this ends—this script is the one that best plays with the confines of the format as a whole (and is a classic example of dramatic irony you can pull out for your next English paper). It neatly represents the emotional crux of the show—the sometimes funny, sometimes bitter realization of things not going your way.
The rest of Act Two’s vignettes are lovely too. ‘Do Us Part’, about a couple having an argument, is crisp and well-acted, and both ‘Laying the Groundwork’ (a woman goes on a date with a man far too knowledgeable about gravel) and ‘Don’t Think’ (a repressed aristocratic couple spice up their life) are genuinely funny—though they both hit the pitfall of taking the joke too far. Despite its flaws, Act Two is charming—it’s just a pity it doesn’t follow an equally strong first half.
Perhaps, you might be thinking, I’m being unfair in pitting Table for Two against A Girl Gets Naked in This. I agree that shows should be able to stand on their own, but the set up for Table for Two is so similar to its predecessor that it’s hard not to see the similarities.
Not to mention, the strength of A Girl Gets Naked proves that People You Know can pull quality off: that they can deliver, as I wrote last year, a show that ‘forces you to grapple with not just the psyche of the characters but that of yourself, your friends, and even that ill-advised hookup you would prefer to forget […] Afterwards, I felt nothing but a cold, scouring frustration, a rage at the world around me that hurts women in this way’. And therein lies the problem with Table for Two. While it was perfectly nice, I didn’t exit Rector’s Café feeling anything.
But, at the end of the day, Table for Two is fun. If you’re tired of Blind Mirth every week, and want to see something that will make you laugh (even if it’s a bit random), this is the show for you. If you want to marvel at a decades-long relationship or scoff at modern corporate culture, you’ll have a great night. Just be prepared for some weirdness—heck, embrace it—and it’ll be fine. Just don’t expect anything resembling a sex monologue.
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