Writer: Dexter Harding
Director: Cara Crozier-Cole
For Max, things may have to get worse before they can get better. He is stuck in an eternal loop of food preparation, the same dinner party with the same people endured over and over again. The jokes are stale and after nearly 700 resets, it all keeps happening just as before. A kind of Groundhog Day with cooking, Dexter Harding’s play Set Menu performed at the Cockpit Theatre as part of the Camden Fringe Festival has a strong conceptual frame and an emotional core but could perhaps question its science fiction basis in more interesting ways.
Staged on a set very similar to Sam Holcroft’s Rules for Living at the National Theatre, the Set Menu team is inspired by Chloe Lamford’s work with a taped-out dining room and kitchen containing marked routes, but doesn’t do nearly enough with the physical location to suggest the same playfulness and carnage that Holcroft built into her family Christmas. The physicality of the space is important though, a singular holding place that keeps Max (played by Harding) from ever leaving this room or progressing beyond 14 August, so these markings should feel increasingly like a prison as well as a well-trodden route.
Harding’s idea is well executed on the whole, presenting multiple versions of the same event to explain Max’s diminishing enthusiasm as well as the slightly different ways in which he tries to break the cycle, introducing new endings and props that create a touch of variation. The overall weariness is convincing, especially when mixed with to-audience monologues that help with exposition and guide the shape of the show.
But there is more to do in giving the dinner party guests more substance as individuals. Oli Silverman’s Mark and Eleanor Hart’s Ellen need to be more than just ‘married’ while we learn only that Amy Kennedy’s Siobhan joined Max’s friendship group much later. For the eventual conclusion to mean more, Set Menu needs to delve further into these relationships and ask questions of their connection that help the drama – how do they know each other, what do they do, how have they sustained a friendship over so many years, does Max enjoy manipulating them, and what aspects of Max’s personality do they reflect?
The key to evolving the show, though, is to engage with the mechanics of the science-fiction resolution managed through the close bond with John-Jack Williams’ Michaelangelo that eventually thwarts the time loop. It’s not quite enough for sentimentality to be the reason, so some thoughts on why this night, how the holding pattern works and what brings the men together to break it would be helpful. And as drama, there are plenty of opportunities here for glitches and confusion that could better draw out the slightly dystopian punishment that Max is enduring and surprise him.
An interesting first course but audiences will go away hungry for more.
Runs until 17 August 2026
Camden Fringe 2026 runs until 30 August
The Reviews Hub Star Rating: