Seating Plan

Aug 6 2025 | By Rebecca Mahar More

★★★★☆ Snappy

Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose (Venue 24): Wed 30 July – Mon 25 Aug 2025
Review by Rebecca Mahar

In a witty two-hander about missed connections, wrong timing, and the opportunities that present themselves —or don’t— by chance in life, Seating Plan trips onto the Nip stage at Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose, raised-glass in hand.

Written by Izzy Radford, Seating Plan follows strangers David (George Airey) and Mavis (Radford) who find themselves seated next to each other at their mutual friends’ birthday party. Direction is by Florence Carr-Jones, who wrote last year’s It’s A Sheet Show for Fools and Thieves, this year coproducing with Currie Productions.

George Airey (David)and Izzy Radford (Mavis) in Seating Plan. Pic: Felix Cave.

The mutual friends, couple Emma and Will, might be the ones whose party it is. But they are offstage background noise to the quotidian drama playing out between David and Mavis.

Mavis is loud, forward, self-describing as “the chatty one,” while David is more reserved, his attitude seeming to match his job at the Office of National Statistics. Their repartee rips along with zinger after zinger, Mavis thoroughly enjoying herself and David becoming ever more confused and disbelieving, until he informs her that he has a girlfriend.

The party ends abruptly, but we pick up a year later at the same event: David, seated next to someone called Peter, swaps that name card for Mavis’s. This year, David is already drunk when Mavis arrives, rather subdued. Their dynamic has swapped, but is underlined by something tense and uncomfortable. It’s a pattern that goes on to repeat itself, traveling through five years of parties, meetings between David and Mavis, and neither of them ever being available or ready at the right time for more than casual acquaintance, for one reason or another.

comic precision

Seating Plan breaks the rule of threes, but it works beautifully. Radford’s writing is sharp and snappy, but not so glib or perfect that it verges into feeling scripted. Carr-Jones has directed Radford and Airey with a comic precision that, like the writing, walks right up to the line of being too much without putting a toe over.

The show’s transitions are as much a part of the story as anything else, with the actors making their inter-year costume changes front and centre, swapping out the numbers on a pair of gold foil balloons to represent the age of Will and Emma as the years go by. There’s nowhere to hide on the tiny Nip stage, and both performers embrace its challenges and opportunities with a will.

Izzy Radford (Mavis) and George Airey (David) in Seating Plan. Pic: Felix Cave.

Radford and Airey both have challenging jobs in Seating Plan, to communicate a year’s worth (or more, in the end) of character development every time they turn around. Both rise to the occasion, serving up intimate encapsulating vignettes in this play that is not a slice of life, but a whole cake.

It would be telling to say whether it winds up happily ever after, but Seating Plan is just as satisfying as any fairytale, trailing amiably off into the next event, as life so often does.

Running time: One hour (no interval).
Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose (Nip), 3 Chambers St. EH1 1HT (Venue 24).
Wed 30 July – Mon 25 August 2025.
Daily (Not Thurs 7 & 21): 5pm.
Tickets and details: Book here on EdFringe.com.
Book here on EdFest.com.*