Theatrical dining

There is a restaurant on the stage at the National Theatre in London. It is called Foodwork, and it is part of the set of Network, an adaptation of Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 masterpiece about a news anchorman called Howard Beale who goes mad and is given a new show — The Howard Beale Show — to preach the gospel of despair. If you think this sounds dull, imagine Huw Edwards threatening suicide after an item about ducks. Beale is played by Bryan Cranston — Peter Finch in the film — and the restaurant will close when the run ends. Ephemera, then; chase the art, chase the cake.

I do not know why they built a restaurant here; some critics have complained that the set, which is Foodwork and a television studio, is too noisy: an oddity, a mistake. I cannot possibly judge it as a restaurant but I can say that I have not had a more glorious night anywhere.

You enter through a gap in immense concrete walls. The National Theatre does not know if it is a spaceship or a pre-medieval castle, but it has come to terms with it and is the only modernist building I have ever loved. Perhaps it is the carpeting: soft, blue, big government at its most benevolent, buying rugs. That will not come again.

You are led on to the stage, and into a restaurant staffed by people so poised they must be actors. There is a long cocktail bar, and tiny tables; blue sofas, a polished floor. It is a renovated Le Caprice on a stage. We are dressed in black, as directed, and we watch the rest of the audience come in. Then the show plays around us.