Don’t make me angry, boys. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.

It’s come to my attention that contemporary televised cuisine is blatantly pulping, juicing and bottling the limelight from our old pal, theatre’s backyard. Jamie Oliver is muscling in on the social vigilance that’s traditionally been the stomping ground of the playwright. Gordon Ramsay’s verbatim performances barely convince (no chef in real life could speak to his KPs like that without receiving a ginger grater to the goolies). And Heston Blumenthal, with his fancypants ‘Ooh, let’s make food entertaining! Look, an ejaculating Roman soufflé!’. Food isn’t meant to be entertaining. Theatre is. Chop us some slack, lads, it’s a recession, and those particular green shoots are not for nibbling.

I jest, of course. But there is an opening in the market here, one still flourishing in North America: Dinner Theatre. In fact, during one production of Arsenic & Old Lace circa 1982, my mother found herself tussling over the last bread roll with the gigantic hand of Lou Ferrigno, aka The Incredible Hulk (see, that opening line wasn’t entirely arbitrary). If only she’d let him have that bread roll. I might have ended up with a new stepfather, a Hollywood childhood and fabulous green skin. O, wondrous thought.

Now, I’ll be honest: I’m a sensory glutton. I smoke a pipe with the paper. I Rubik’s Cube at the cinema. I listen to my ‘Learn Romanian Super Quick Fast!’ CD in the bubble bath. This epicurean overload isn’t for everyone. But there’s something deliciously decadent about dinner theatre’s concept: starter, first act, main course, second act, desserts and coffee with the finale. Yum.

This hankering to feed the belly as well as the mind led me to this week’s venue. Our show will be advertised, like all good dinner parties, via word of mouth; a discreet meeting point set in deepest darkest Bermondsey. From there a jaunt around the cobblestones works up your appetite, and you pass an old mission house with the ambiguous command FEED MY LAMBS carved into it. Finally you emerge at the dilapidated remains of a blubber factory, hidden between a disused leather market and the structural ghosts of vinegar plants. The old industrial heart of London, and, our venue. Several tables are splayed out for dinner, though you won’t choose who you sit next to. A chef broils and glowers and dices in a corner. Waiters shuffle and twinkle and deliver notes from other diners. And as dinner progresses, so does the plot. Though, you’re never quite sure who’s acting and who’s watching.

It probably wouldn’t suit Seneca’s Thyestes — we don’t want them to suspect they’re eating last night’s audience. What we’d need is a metamorphic play that uses each course as a sensory rocket launcher into the next. Culminating, of course, in the skulking possibility of a massive, madcap food fight.

And then at the meal’s end the Incredible Hulk bustles round tables, handing out wet wipes and making witty banter.

Cheque, please.

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To my closest friends it’s a piece of vertiginous tomfoolery. To me it’s an affair of towering gravitas. I refer, of course, to my jealously-guarded hopes of becoming a free-running champion.

For those of you unacquainted with the modern marvels of free running, Parkour enthusiasts are those nimble will-o-wisps that bound through our cityscapes, clambering water-towers, conquering construction sites, pin-balling off cement-marooned trees to hang from mezzanines and generally encouraging your significant other to say things like ‘Oooh, hasn’t he got ripply arms?! I’d love to go out with someone like that. You know, someone with actual muscle definition. Actually, you know what would be nice, darling: if you started exercising above your fingertips, beyond the personal gym that is your MacBook.’ But I digress.

The natural habitat of these fine athletes has of late been the South Bank. The other day I was admiring their foot and handiwork —hoping their master would note my potential, beckon enigmatically, and invite me over to work on my decidedly un-ripply arms— when I noticed a group of unruly Lambeth youths mimicking them. They were hauling themselves up the electrician’s ladder on Waterloo bridge, vaulting over the fraying tightrope of a low-wire clown, offering to toss themselves into the Thames for the bargain price of a pound.

Somebody, I magnanimously concluded, should say something. I stood up, assumed my socio-conscious playwright face, and walked straight past them to write this blog. Never say I don’t contribute to the welfare of my community.

So. If the mantra of free runners is to treat the city as a playground, why shouldn’t we encourage more of this in our theatres? They may not be called playhouses anymore but a few of them retain the noble intentions of amusement. What if we found an off-west end theatre that did have enough space to allow these dizzying displays of neo-Olympian athleticism? What if we had a Rooftop Theatre?

Moving to London, the idea first occurred to me via the scientifically dubious medium of a dream. This involved myself and childhood friends (RAF navigator, marine biologist, semi-professional dog-napper) inheriting an old sausage factory in the midst of derelict Wapping and transforming it into a (ceiling) cracking venue.

Well, there may not be an old sausage factory waiting for us out there. But there is a fantastic jigsaw of pub roofs in Farringdon. There’s an unused swathe of station roof by Waterloo. There’s a lovely little nook above a 99p store in Clapham. And what play to better demonstrate the versatility of our giddy venture than an actobatic, contemporary reworking of Henry V, with plummeting channels between France and England for the battle scenes. ‘Once more into the breach’ and all that. Especially if the breach in question happened to be a thirty foot drop to the streets below. 

Okay, so it’s a recipe for apoplectic insurers. But perhaps we could draft in a few unruly Lambeth youths willing to shake some spears and waive their Equity pensions.

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