The Dinner Party by Katherine Araniello

7.30pm. Free
(limited capacity – booking essential)

Katherine Araniello, well known for her witty and challenging performances for camera, will be appearing live in person in The Dinner Party this July, for one night only. This very special one-woman show* promises to disturb and delight. In a characteristic twist, Araniello’s solo dinner party will not be for ‘dream guests’ or ‘women of excellence’. The ‘guests from hell’ who will attend her dinner are based on encounters that the artist has experienced in her own real life.

Araniello has long wanted to rework the comedy Dinner for One, best known in its 1963 TV version, as a one woman (and butler) show. Although a perennial staple of New Year’s viewing in Germany, and something of a cult favourite in Norway and Australia, Dinner for One is largely unknown here in the U.K.

Araniello saw this one-act comedy as a potential vehicle in which to expand and develop her ongoing concern with the contemporary enthusiasm for Assisted Suicide. It is this subject to which her guests refer, however obliquely, throughout The Dinner Party. The original deathly undertones of Dinner for One (in which the butler play-acts all the parts of the absent, presumably deceased guests) are reconfigured in Araniello’s show – she has subtitled it Come Die with Me, in homage to the well-known reality show, which she also relishes.

*The performance will feature a guest appearance by Dr Ernst Fischer as the butler.

Artsadmin’s Bursary Scheme 2010-11 is supported by Artsadmin, Arts Council England, Centre for Excellence in Training for Theatre at Central School of Speech and Drama and by generous donors to Small Change.