REVIEW: A Couple Decides What to Have for Dinner – Melbourne Comedy Festival


I think you have to admire a show that uses such a prosaic title and delivers exactly as promised. And when I say delivers, I don’t mean the dinner of the title. That dinner may never come. Indecision is at the heart of this amusing, wry observation of married life and the mundanity of trying to decide what to have for dinner when you don’t want to cook or move from the couch at all.

Writer and director James Hazelden crafts a clever fifty-minute slice-of-life, where husband and wife are hungry but cannot agree on a cuisine. Having every option at their fingertips is paralysing for the pair. But this play isn’t just about food, it spins off into interrogating all their life choices. Why did they get married? Should they have had children? Who’s going to look after them when they get old?

Amanda Buckley and Chris Saxton are believably comfortable in their pjs on the couch, staring at the TV flickering in front of them, worried that they’ve run out of stories to tell each other. But while the content dips into big themes, the show stays light and funny throughout. Full of highly-relatable couples content and lots of belly laughs.

Get along to the Butterfly Club – but have dinner before, because otherwise this show will make you hungry, indecisive or both. 

- Keith Gow, Theatre First

A Couple Decides What to Have for Dinner is on at the Butterfly Club until March 30

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