The Worst Café in the World – à la carte comedy theatre (Big Telly at CQAF until Monday 6 May) #cqaf24

Big Telly (Granny Jackson’s Dead) have revived The Worst Café in the World with an updated à la carte reimagining of the original set menu extravaganza.

Shown to a table, as soon as you sit down and are offered a glass of water, you get a strong sense that everything on the food and drink menus will trigger an unexpected result. In fact, over time, part of the pleasure is in trying to imagine what skit will result from ordering particular items.

There are verbal gags aplenty, and moments when one waiter will shout an instruction – like an American footballer calling a play – and the other waiters will immediately join in these collegiate servings, as well as times when the chef will hand out props and trigger a Sharing Platter: a full one or two-minute performance for the whole café to enjoy. Big Telly are working with other partner organisations: at my sitting, NI Opera’s soprano Mary McCabe dazzled us with a gorgeous song.

While the sense of an overarching story arc is missing from this Worst Café iteration, the more casual dining experience with an ever-changing set of customers – you’ll typically stay for thirty minutes – allows you to sample a menu of simple comedy morsels and more elaborate and involved set pieces from the cast of four.

Ordering a Small Plate of Angry Scottish Wasp was one of my favourite dishes. Though a side of Trump, and a Club Sandwich washed down with some Young People Whine is good too.

This is the theatrical version of close magic. The cast have to be comfortable moving around the space, engaging and improvising with the audience, and have rapid recall for the routines that must follow a whole menu full of trigger words. Kudos to Big Telly for indoctrinating training more local actors (Cat Barter, Kealan McAllister, Vicky Allen and Michael Johnston) up in their style of madcap comedy drama. And hats off to the two chefs – stage managers Keeley Ball and Rhiannon Morgan – who keep the energy up with their curated sequence of chef selected routines.

You can book a seat at Big Telly’s pop-up café online. It’s running as part of Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival until 8pm on Monday 6 May. They’ve also just finished a run in Philadelphia and New York (where it won an innovative theatre award).

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