Set Menu is a brand new play from the brilliant Dexter Harding directed by the wonderful Cara Crozier-Cole. The play follows a Friday night. The food is ready, the drinks are cold, the cutlery is set. Max is primed to throw the perfect dinner party. He has to. Nothing but perfection will do, because nothing else seems to have worked. After a hundred attempts, he knows exactly what to do, what to say and where to say it. It’s 7: 24PM. The doorbell rings. It’s showtime.
A few hours later, the guests are piling into their taxis, laughing, singing, belts loosened, eyes wide, as Max waits for the clock to tell him he is free. This time for sure, has earned a tomorrow.
Set Menu begins almost six hundred days later. Max has tried and failed to escape so many times that he is losing all sense of time, reality and himself. No matter what he throws at the wall, nothing even begins to stick. The clock resets, the guests forget and he begins again at square one. By now, he has basically stopped trying. So much so, that on a particularly awful night of shouting matches, food poisoning and a small fire, he decides to reset the night early with a kitchen knife. Only, when he wakes up to try again, something is different. He has lost a pen. And for the first time in almost two years, he seems to have made some progress. So the plan is simple: Chaos. He is going to beat whatever force is keeping him trapped at its own game by doing everything he can think of to make this the worst dinner party in the history of dinner parties. Armed with an intricate knowledge of the house’s contents and the guests’ psyches, he will take on the role of a twisted puppeteer with nothing to lose.
The food is burnt, the drinks are spiked, the cutlery is sharpened.
But as the anarchy begins to reach its peak, Max is confronted with a terrifying truth, one that he has long forced himself to forget. One of the guests was never supposed to be there. And they might just know more than they let on...