'Table 17' review — the fantastic cast make a hearty meal out of this charming romcom

Read our review of Table 17, starring Marisha Wallace, now in performances at the Kiln Theatre to 24 October.

Summary

• Table 17 has its UK premiere at the Kiln Theatre
• The romcom play sees two exes meet for dinner
• The fantastic cast features Marisha Wallace, Jamael Westman and Michael Rishawn

You can’t go home again, romantically speaking, or can you? That question hovers over the interval-free 90 minutes of Table 17, Douglas Lyons’s featherweight romcom that has reached London two years after its Off Broadway bow.

As in New York, the casting here is largely the occasion. A vehicle Stateside for two-time Tony-winner Kara Young, the play now boasts Olivier nominees Marisha Wallace (Guys and Dolls, Oklahoma!) and Jamael Westman (London’s first Alexander Hamilton). They and fellow actor Michael Rishawn, the production’s lone holdover from the US, make a hearty meal out of what in essence is fairly thin gruel, roping the audience in from the start as ready participants in the fun.

Chances are you’ve been down this dramatic path before but rarely with the brio brought to the table (number 17, in fact) by director Zhailon Levingston, a 2026 Tony winner for the glorious Cats: The Jellicle Ball. Telling of a onetime couple who meet up for dinner two years after they chose to part, the play recalls the road that has led to their decision to call it quits, while hinting near the end at a brighter tomorrow.

The invitation to dine has come from Westman’s Dallas, a teetotaling music producer who still carries a torch for Wallace’s impetuous Jada. This sassy flight attendant’s buccaneering energy would surely endear Jada to the giddy Miss Adelaide whom this performer so memorably played at the Bridge Theatre, before taking over as Sally Bowles in Cabaret in London and on Broadway.

The 16 scenes ricochet back and forth in time, the characters now and again revealing their inner thoughts while voicing something different in the actual moment – Woody Allen is among the proven masters of this device.

An Emcee of sorts, albeit across three roles, is provided by the protean Rishawn, who plays a deliciously OTT gay waiter one minute (his Geppetto joke is priceless), a deep-voiced rival for Jada’s affections the next. Rishawn further sells the sizzle as the nightclub bartender who attempts to pick up Jada on the night she and Dallas first meet – seven years prior to the start of the play.

As psychological enquiry, Lyons’s writing doesn’t cut particularly deep: I was put in mind more than once of the wonderful British two-hander Shifters, itself recently seen Off Broadway and far more deeply, prismatically felt. A passing reference to Oprah suits the bald-faced nature of insight on the order of this from Dallas: “My heart was still looking in the rearview mirror. I had to pull over and check my blindspot.”

Luckily, the cast has enough gusto to charge through the text’s cheesier moments, and the purely emotive appeal of the production cannot be denied. If London is twice blest, Rishawn will follow his American compatriot Wallace’s lead and set up shop in the capital – his timing is something to behold. (“I work here; I don’t eat here,” snaps River, the restaurant employee, to riotous effect.)

Both aggrieved lovers are spot on and look to be having a field day corralling an audience without recourse to a songlist and band. Westman’s rangy, easygoing charm is second to none and has a neat complement in Wallace’s excitable Jada, whose belated discovery of a sufficiency in herself – “I am enough,” she concludes – suggests that this character at least emerges from the evening properly and fully fed.

Table 17 is at the Kiln Theatre to 24 October. Book Table 17 tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Table 17 (Photos by Steve Gregson)