Amongst Friends
Hampstead
Taking Sides/Collaboration
Duchess
Who wrote the first ‘dinner party from hell’ drama? Shakespeare had a couple of stabs with Titus Andronicus and the banquet scene in Macbeth where Banquo’s ghost arrives to ruin a perfectly good evening. Ovid told of Procne who killed her son, Itys, and served him up in a pie to her husband Tereus. And it was Aeschylus, as I recall, who originated the genre with Prometheus Vinctus in which the main character is also the main course. The latest attempt, Amongst Friends by April De Angelis, is set in a yuppie dream-home which a tabloid hack and her ex-MP husband are keen to show off to their old chums; one’s a cancer nurse, the other an addiction counsellor with a serious addiction. What unites them is a cynical, over-competitive world view.
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