Dinner At The Twits, The Vaults, SE1

an edited version of this review was published in The Times, 16 September 2016

 

 

Here’s a secret. I’ve always hated The Twits. Roald Dahl may top lists of the country’s favourite children’s author (with added fanfare, this week, for the centenary of his birth) but there’s something unedifying about this story’s insistence that ugly people are ugly on the inside too.

Fortunately, you don’t need to share Dahl’s dark humour to appreciate the professional expertise on show in this fully immersive dining experience. The Twits, as you may recall, engaged in marital warfare by feeding surprise horrors to each other. So we take part in the dinner party from hell. The attention to detail is exhaustive: edible insects emerge from coleslaw bowls; chicken hearts are consumed like lollipops; menacing claws, looking as though they’ve been cooked alive, adorn the top of each individual pheasant pie. The mystery that remains, at more than £80 a head, is whether we are expected to enjoy it.

The most luxurious aspect of the experience is the rather retro bar, lusciously designed by Samuel Wyer. (I explored Mrs Twit’s sewing box.) Once we move on, there’s a lot of standing around in the garden (sample canapé: crispy pig’s ears) redeemed by Wyer’s beautifully lit Big Dead Tree. Only at the subsequent banquet, in the Vaults’s long, arched hallway, do things get decidedly school dinner. Your cash has been well invested in the set, but it has not been spent flavouring the distinctly synthetic trifle.

Chris Barlow and Lizzy Dive are bombastic enough as our sadistic hosts — Dive channelling Helena Bonham Carter in Les Misérables. And there are flashes of wit from the wider ensemble: “I used to work for Ocado,” mourns one young man, now enslaved and forced to perform in The Twits’ Upside Down Monkey Circus. Yes, it’s dark stuff.

Yet it’s not clear who the target is for this extravagant consumer experience. We’re roped into spiking Mr Twit’s drink with garbage — which feels like something a dim ten-year-old could love — but “nasty, nosey” under-14s are banned, and the night is acutely alcoholic. The most vaunted gimmick is a beer, purportedly made with microbes swabbed from the great man’s writing chair. Even my bellini was made with tubes of peach “glue”. (Passable.) “We’re reliving our childhoods,” beamed the couple in their thirties next to me. Rather you than me.