It's not the kind of meal that Jamie Oliver would serve up down the road.

But Moira Buffini's stylised allegory is agreeable fare, which slips down rather well.

The set is the home of social Darwinist Lars and his acerbic wife, Paige, who has thrown a dinner party to celebrate the release of his pop psychology tome.

Egos collide over a menu of primordial soup, apocalypse of lobsters and frozen waste as the meal descends into a morass of sarcasm and recrimination. Each course is presented immaculately by designer Beverley Grover and director Mike Padley.

Emma Sayers is deliciously caustic as Paige and delivers each line with real froideur while Peta Morrant is convincingly supercilious as Lars.

A sinister butler provides the coup de grace in a dramatic device intended to present this soiree from hell as a metaphor for the whole of existence.

But the deeper meaning is lost in an unconvincing resolution and characters who speak to make a point rather than drive the narrative.

Dinner works as an enjoyable farce but its many dramatic precursors, like Mike Leigh's Abigail's Party, make for better pastiches of the empty mores of the middle class.