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.