When isn’t there big family drama in the buildup to a wedding? The nerves, the tantrums – sometimes even charges of “inappropriate” first dances. Isn’t it all part and parcel of the apparently perfect day?
That emotional messiness is laid bare in Dante or Die’s utterly gorgeous site-specific show, first performed in 2013, now reprised at a number of Malmaison hotels, including this one in London as part of the Barbican’s Scene Change season.
Created by Daphna Attias and Terry O’Donovan, it captures the final 10 minutes before the ceremony is due to begin. The audience is divided into groups and shuttles between six rooms, each in a different order, which encapsulate these final moments before Georgie (Carla Langley) and Tunde (Dauda Ladejobi) tie the knot.
Initially, it seems like an exercise in carefully coordinated – albeit funny and fascinating – voyeurism, with the usual wedding day tropes at play: spirited bridesmaids dancing on a bed, surreptitious shags and “call it all off” nerves for the bride and groom. But it becomes more and more moving, intimately revealing anguish and insecurity, turning a snapshot into a world.
Each room brings a new scenario, from an encounter between Georgie’s mother, Helen (Johanne Murdock), and her unfaithful ex-husband, David (Jonathan McGuinness), which brings a devastating moment of regretful tenderness, to same-sex passion involving the fabulously antsy best man Joe (Manish Gandhi).
And each scenario captures a kind of love. In one of the most painful scenes, we enter into the room of Georgie’s grandparents, Gordon (Geof Atwell) and Eileen (Fiona Watson), who is dressing him. He is sitting in a wheelchair, unable to talk or move, perhaps as the result of a stroke. Her frayed love and his red-faced frustration are captured with such economy by writer Chloë Moss, all the more so when Helen comes in, to find her father half-dressed in his wheelchair. “I miss you,” she says, more to herself, while he looks on with desperation. The depth of this small tragedy is caught so keenly in those few words.
The set design by Jenny Hayton perfectly replicates the corporate kitsch of this hotel-wrapped wedding package world (rose petals scattered on a bed, towels crafted into love hearts) alongside the personal detritus of the characters, from TCP in the bathroom to the table plan in Helen’s bedroom and the champagne bottles in the bride’s.
There are searing performances all round and immaculate direction by Attias, allowing for stillness in which emotions evolve through looks between characters, touches, tiny shifts in expression.
The story gathers shape gradually. It is sequenced so we join up the intrigues ourselves, at our own pace. There is a corny – even cliched – element in the returning figure of a cleaner who enters rooms and travels through the corridors in a backward motion, as if rewinding the drama. But even he brings a surreal charm.
You care for almost every character by the end. It’s as big, heart-wrenching, ridiculous and wonderful as any wedding day.
• At Malmaison hotel, London, until 8 February. Then touring
