Bread and Butter Productions – Jake Butterworth and Polly Hoban – are making their debut at Edinburgh Fringe this year with their new show Dinner With The Wolves, a dark comedy thriller.
“‘May we get what we want, may we get what we need but may we never get what we deserve.’ Around a dining table in East London, four friends are forced on a trip down memory lane. From Cabourg to Tokyo, past to present, they drink too much, laugh too loudly and await the arrival of the guest of honour, Mr Wolfe. Dinner with the Wolves is a satirical exploration of friendship, power and the costs of modern masculinity.”
Where: Jade Studio at Greenside @ George Street
When: 7-22 Aug
Ticket link: https://www.edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/dinner-with-the-wolves
What can you tell us about your show? What is it about and where did the idea come from?
Our show is a dark comedy of no manners set around a dinner table in East London. Our guests are a group of East London faux liberals with a taste for drama and revenge. As the evening goes on, old memories resurface, and long-buried tensions begin to emerge, forcing everyone around the table to confront past skeletons.
At its heart, Dinner With the Wolves is a darkly comic exploration of friendship, power and modern masculinity, all wrapped up in the mystery of a man who seems to plague the room before he even arrives.
The show was born last year during an eight-hour journey back and forth from Manchester to London. We were laughing about the experience of being in your early twenties and trying to throw dinner parties. Drinking Lambrini out of plastic flute glasses, shopping in the freezer section for ‘nibbles’ and playing dress up with mates. Although we both agreed the whole premise of a dinner party felt frigid, frumpy and outdated, it amused us that even as young adults we felt the desire to perform the “grown-up” ritual of exchanging small talk with people you then slag off behind closed curtains.
These events felt like a breeding ground for British middle-class double-speak. We knew we wanted to make something fresh and stylistically simple after our last show, but we also wanted to play with genre. The script is a blend of satire, comedy and thriller. Although the script now is a distant relative to that of the original, the core themes are the same: performative politeness, power, masculinity, revenge, friendship, class, love.
As for our characters, they took a lot longer to develop. Despite the satirical element of our show, we knew we wanted our characters to have nuance, rather than having them be two-dimensional villains or heroes. In other words, they are all flawed, just some definitely more so than others.
How would you sell it to audiences in one paragraph?
Dinner With the Wolves is a dark comedy about the lengths people go to in order to keep things looking fine. Five old friends gather to welcome home Arthur Wolfe, our hostess’s husband, who’s missing from his own party. Over wine, sea bass, and brittle small talk, twenty years of secrets slowly surface. By the time pudding arrives, nothing is what it seemed.
Do you enjoy participating in the Fringe? And do you have any moments you particularly remember?
This year will actually be our debut! No one involved in the production has been to the Fringe before, so as you can imagine we are all extremely excited for this August.
What are you looking forward to the most in Edinburgh?
We’ve talked a lot about this actually, and honestly, it’s tough. Being around other performers is definitely up there; the choice of shows this year is amazing. So I suppose what is most exciting is getting to really throw ourselves into the experience, meeting people who are doing similar things, or completely different to us.
What’s next for the show?
As a team, what I think we really do well is collaboration. Our show has evolved significantly since it started back in January, and that’s thanks to an amazing cast and crew. We hope that by the time we touch down in Edinburgh, the show is even better than it was in May in our debut shows, but after that, who knows. We will have to wait and see.