I’m reviewing – An immersive hotel drama as gorgeous as a real wedding day | stage

Wchicken not so Is there major family drama in the build-up to the wedding? Nervousness, tantrums, and sometimes accusations of “inappropriate” first dances. Isn’t this all part and parcel of a seemingly perfect day?

This emotional chaos is revealed in the site’s magnificent Dante or Die show, first presented in 2013, which has now been re-staged at a number of Malmaison hotels, including this one in London as part of the Barbican’s Scene Change season.

Created by Daphna Atias and Terry O’Donovan, it depicts the last ten minutes before the ceremony begins. The audience is divided into groups and moves between six rooms, each in a different arrangement, which encapsulates these final moments before Georgie (Carla Langley) and Tunde (Dauda Ladijobi) marry.

At first, it seems like a carefully orchestrated—albeit funny and fascinating—exercise in voyeurism, with the usual wedding-day tropes in play: vivacious bridesmaids dancing on the bed, hidden hair, and the “cancel everything” nerves of the bride and groom. But it becomes more and more poignant, intimately revealing pain and insecurity, turning the snapshot into a world.

Each room brings a new scenario, from an encounter between Georgie’s mother, Helen (Johan Murdock), and her cheating ex-husband, David (Jonathan McGuinness), which brings a devastating moment of unfortunate tenderness, to a homosexual passion involving his wonderfully boring best man, Joe (Manish Gandhi).

Each scenario embodies a type of love. In one of the most painful scenes, we enter the room of Georgie’s grandparents, Gordon (Geoff Atwell) and Eileen (Fiona Watson), who dresses him. He is sitting in a wheelchair, unable to speak or move, possibly as a result of a stroke. Her doomed love and its red-hot frustration are depicted with such economy by writer Chloe Moss, especially when Helen comes to find her father half-dressed in his wheelchair. “I miss you,” she says to herself more, while he looks on desperately. The depth of this little tragedy is shown so clearly in those few words.

Jenny Hayton’s set design perfectly replicates the company’s style in the world of hotel-wrapped wedding displays (rose petals scattered on the bed, towels made into love hearts) juxtaposed with the characters’ personal detritus, from the TCP in the bathroom to the table chart in Helen’s bedroom and the bottles of champagne in the bride’s room.

There are searing performances throughout the film and Attias’s impeccable direction, allowing a stillness in which emotions develop through glances between characters, touches and small shifts in expression.

The story comes together gradually. It’s been serialized so that we piece together the plots ourselves, at our own pace. There is an element of vulgarity – even vulgarity – in the returning character of the janitor who enters rooms and moves through corridors in reverse motion, as if reliving the drama. But even he brings a surreal charm.

You care about almost every character by the end. It’s a big, heart-wrenching, ridiculous, and wonderful day like any wedding day.