Written in 1988, After Dinner is Andrew Bovell’s first
play. Set in a suburban pub bistro, five single thirty-somethings meet after
work for Friday night drinks and a meal, and their very individual
personalities and circumstances collide in an achingly brutal riot of sex,
misdirections, and variations on the idea of friendship.
Best known for his
plays such as When The Rain Stops Falling,
Speaking in Tongues
(later filmed as Lantana), Holy Day, and the
recent adaptation of Kate Grenville’s The
Secret River, Bovell is increasingly drawn to the turbulence and tumult
of daily lives, the dark and gripping mysteries which lie concealed beneath a
veneer of normalcy in each of our lives. Written when he was just twenty-one, After
Dinner lacks his trademark finesse and subtlety; everything here is
dialled up larger than it should be, all seems to be turned well past
naturalism into a kind of crude grotesquerie. Presented here by the Sydney Theatre Company, it is
one-hundred minutes of painfully coarse and blunt banter between the five
lonely hearts, as their Friday night quickly deteriorates into a night none of
them would want to remember in a hurry.
