Review of Table 17 at Kiln Theatre: the play serves, but the waiter eats

Elena Leo is the Culture & Lifestyle Editor of Ikon London Magazine.

Douglas Lyons’s romantic comedy puts two ex-fiancés back at the same table and recruits the audience as confidants. Marisha Wallace and Jamael Westman give the evening plenty of fizz in the main roles, but it is Michael Rishawn who steals the show.

If you sit next to Table 17 at Bianca’s restaurant, you will be served a 90-minute prix fixe of eavesdropping on two exes, Jada and Dallas, rehashing four years of their relationship. There is a spicy side dish, too: River, the host-waiter with the clipboard, the attitude and the unnerving ability to comment on everybody’s romantic life more than a chronically single man really should.

On press night at Kiln Theatre, more than 200 people were invited to join this group-therapy session. We were asked, quite explicitly, to get involved: help Jada choose what to wear for the “rebound date”, clap along with Dallas, sympathise with River’s dating woes. Normally, this sort of audience participation can become theatre’s equivalent of an unwanted party game. Here, it felt surprisingly natural.

There is a big Dear Diary quality to Table 17: candid confessions, private observations, people telling us what they really meant while pretending to tell each other. The truth is that Jada and Dallas fell properly in love, they lived together, they got engaged, but things went wrong. Now, after a long silence and Dallas’s call out of the blue, they have agreed to sit opposite each other and see what, if anything, remains.

The clever thing is that the audience becomes witnesses to the reunion. The less convincing part is what has brought them back to the table: even once the history is unpacked, Dallas’s reason for making that call remains a little hazy.

Jada arrives first, magnetic and voluptuous, her curves packed neatly into a very tight, golden, shimmering dress. She is singing into a hairbrush while getting ready to face the ex-fiancé she has not seen for two years. This is another clever trick, because Marisha Wallace, who plays Jada, is famous, and deservedly so, for what happens when she opens her mouth to sing — from Guys & Dolls to Cabaret. This is her first non-singing stage role, and the pleasant surprise is that she doesn’t seem to need the voice at all. The fluidity of her movement, the confidence and the sheer physical command are enough to keep you looking at her every move.

Jada is going on this date against her therapist’s advice. Anyone who has sat in therapy and subsequently wondered whether doing the thing you have been warned against is an act of courage, self-possession or simply a spectacularly efficient way of falling back into an old pattern will recognise the territory.

Then we have River, and with his arrival the evening acquires its own commentator, or perhaps its audience voice. If you ever doubted what is right or wrong, River can give you a condescending one-liner that somehow makes you feel like the most popular kid on the block. Michael Rishawn plays him as the all-knowing, hyper-observant host, permanently ready with a raised eyebrow or a perfectly timed piece of sarcasm. His hard exterior is useful armour: a safety net against getting hurt, but also a fairly effective barrier against the successful relationship he claims to want. Underneath is a hopeless romantic. Ultimately, River gives us the best seat in the house. Rishawn also plays Eric, Jada’s secondary love interest, and the switches between characters are brisk and funny in themselves.

Jamael Westman’s Dallas is the charming one — your Popular Boy, your Good and Hardworking Boy. He meets Jada on a night out, they fall for each other, and eventually he gets down on one knee. As the modern era requires, the proposal is filmed on a phone. Then his music-producing ambition takes hold and Dallas spends more and more time pursuing the career he wants, while Jada begins to feel that she is somewhere outside the frame. She is an air hostess, and Eric gives her the attention Dallas apparently feels is no longer necessary once they are engaged.

Westman has an easy, likeable quality that makes Dallas’s behaviour more complicated than the stock version of the neglectful boyfriend. Towards the end, he gets a monologue that opens him up: behind the popular-boy confidence is somebody trying very hard to succeed. Jamael is another transition from the big musical stage to fringe theatre — he was the original Alexander Hamilton in the Victoria Palace production of Hamilton in London. No surprise that he can command an audience.

Wallace and Westman have undeniable chemistry. You believe they were once in love, which is rather essential when the evening asks you to care about what happens next.

The set helps enormously. Amy Jane Cook gives us a small rotating restaurant booth which becomes, with remarkable economy, an apartment, an aeroplane and a dive bar. Matt Haskins’s lighting changes the atmosphere in a fraction of a second. Spotlights let the actors step outside the scene and recruit the audience again.

In fact, the audience involvement is considerably more convincing than some productions that advertise themselves as immersive. Nobody is making you crawl through a set or pretending you are part of an elaborate fictional world. The person with the clipboard knows that simply trusting you with the gossip works a lot better.

But structurally, there is a slight oddity here. The play gives us a great deal of information about why Jada falls for Eric and what she feels she is missing, whereas Dallas’s side of the equation is summed up rather more bluntly: women, we can’t read your mind. The collapse of Jada and Dallas’s relationship is strangely under-examined, even though we understand the timeline of events. But if Table 17 is an entertainment-first play about relationships, a romantic comedy, you won’t demand of it what it doesn’t set out to be.

Four and a half stars, then. The missing half is a small caution for anybody arriving in search of deep relationship drama and expecting the emotional excavation to match the banter.

Table 17
Kiln Theatre, 269 Kilburn High Road, London NW6 7JR

Dates: 17 September–24 October 2026
Running time: Approximately 90 minutes, no interval

Writer: Douglas Lyons
Director: Zhailon Levingston
Cast: Marisha Wallace, Jamael Westman, Michael Rishawn

Tickets: https://kilntheatre.com/