Dramatic dinner parties are invariably hell. Who would be a guest at the Macbeths' ghost-ridden banquet or at Titus Andronicus's cannibalistic feast? Things are not much better in Moira Buffini's Dinner at the Lyttelton Loft. It is like a weird mix of Bunuel and Ray Cooney - exposing, entertainingly if somewhat predictably, the latent nastiness of the bourgeoisie.
Buffini begins amusingly with a bitch-hostess, Paige, assembling guests in honour of her husband's philosophical bestseller: a work that, in celebrating the untrammelled will, clearly holds the mirror up to Nietzsche. And, since the guests include a microbiologist sparring with his celebrity-newsreader wife, and a bohemian artist just dumped by her politician lover, they are clearly meant to represent a cross-section of the metropolitan smart set. Buffini sets a catalyst among the pigeons with the unexpected arrival of a working-class van driver and pseudo-thief, clearly meant to expose the hollowness of these indiscreet diners.
The set-up is sharply funny with Harriet Walter presiding at the feast like an acid-tongued Lucrezia Borgia, and offering first primordial soup, and then something winningly called "apocalypse of lobster". The guests are invited either to immerse the live crustaceans in boiling water, or save them by dunking them in a brine-filled pond. But, having gone to such trouble to create this barbaric feast, Buffini has little to tell us other than that these are sad, unhappy people whose final motive is one of crude self-preservation. As the play descends into black farce, it simply becomes an attack on the kind of selfish, psyche-driven society advocated by Paige's husband.
Even if the elaborate means scarcely justify the obvious end, Fiona Buffini's production has a poisonous stylishness. Walter drips rancid elegance as the hostess from hell, and there is lively support from Nicholas Farrell as her superman-worshipping husband, Penny Downie as an unquenchable gusher, and Catherine McCormack as an affectless newsbabe. Christopher Ettridge as a lugubrious waiter reminds me of the Ben Travers butler called Death who asks "At what time would you like your call?"
The presentation, including Rachel Blue's swank dinner table set, is fine. I wish the play lived up to its savage promise instead of allowing its bile to descend into philosophical bromides.
· Until December 14. Box office: 020-7452 3000
