(From left) Justine Mitchell, Nathaniel Martello-White, Andy Clark and Imogen Doel in sell-out production Gastronauts. Photography: Johan Persson

It’s a Tuesday evening and I’m standing with 59 people in a low-lit room, surrounded by flashing lights and ghostly voices. Through a blue window, I can see dining tables laden with bottles of Berry Bros. & Rudd’s Good Ordinary Claret. A uniformed waiter with a fox’s head partially obscures my view.

Created by April De Angelis, Nessah Muthy and Wils Wilson, Gastronauts is the new ground-breaking play currently showing upstairs at London’s Royal Court Theatre, home of avant-garde drama. It’s described as ‘an adventure with food and music’ and places diners literally at the centre of the action, on swivelling 360° chairs, as scenes are played out on adjacent tables or by the waiters. With no idea who your fellow dinner guests are, and still less of a clue what may be on the evening’s menu, this is a play which requires an appetite for the unexpected.

Left: Imogen Doel; right: Justine Mitchell. Photography: Johan Persson

From the ‘departure gate’ (or ‘lobby’ for those yet to suspend their sense of disbelief), an airline pilot with an Edwardian moustache ushers us to our seats and introduces the cast, our flight attendants, who break into a hymn to bread as we are served our appetiser. Meanwhile, a loaf is placed in an oven to bake.

What follows is a bizarre, thought-provoking and extremely entertaining journey through our relationship with food, accompanied by a glass or two of claret. The capacity for food to evoke emotion is explored – a person on my table nostalgically remarks that the soup course is “just like her mother’s” – while the brilliant surround-sound and lighting supports the action as it travels around the room.

The drama of the subsequent courses is used to pose questions about the economics and politics of food: we eavesdrop on a morally-questionable date, are held hostage by a riot and witness satirical songs about our celebrity- and diet-saturated culture. The ideas are intriguing and the food manages to be both delicious and confusing. A main course of an egg-and-cress sandwich, salad and profiteroles (which turns out to be nothing of the sort) is an unsettling highlight.

At the end of the meal, the loaf of bread is duly removed from the oven – its homely smell quite at odds with the now-charged atmosphere. The ‘fourth wall’ has been well and truly eliminated and the audience has been taken on a highly original journey.

Whether Gastronauts is to your taste or not, one thing I can now attest to is that Good Ordinary Claret, the long-established stalwart of the Berry Bros. list, certainly lives up to its reputation as a match for all kinds of food. A lesson I’ll remember, should I ever again need a red wine that works well with fried locusts…

Justine Mitchell and Nathaniel Martello-White in Gastronauts at The Royal Court theatre. Photography: Johan Persson