Has the day of a wedding ever gone smoothly? The bride is stressing out, the groom is having second thoughts, the kids are being a nightmare, and there’s always one underpaid staff member keeping it all together. If your palms are already sweating, ‘I Do’ may be the show for you.
Spread across six rooms in the Malmaison Hotel, Piccadilly, Dante or Die’s ‘I Do’ follows the final 10 minutes before a wedding from six different perspectives. The mother of the bride struggles to decide on both her hat and her relationship to her unfaithful ex-husband, while their daughter fears nothing more than becoming just like them. Her husband-to-be struggles with the mounting pressure of marriage, while his best man’s last-minute speech slowly falls to pieces. Add a messy troupe of bridesmaids and groomsmen, plus a pair of ailing grandparents, and we have a colourful cocktail of disasters waiting to happen – garnished perfectly, of course, by the trainee cleaner, moving silently from room to room.
Created by Daphna Attias and Terry O’Donovan with writing by Chloë Moss, ‘I Do’ is one of the most unique productions to grace the theatre scene. The audience is split into six groups, each marked with its own buttonhole rose, and guided from room to room as the final 10 minutes repeat and rewind. Guests watch the action unfold from whatever space they can carve out for themselves, whether that be stood in the corner, sat on the bed, or even squashed in the bath, and the line between viewer and voyeur quickly becomes blurred. Each room rings a new scenario, and with it, a new piece of the puzzle to slot into place, bringing the flurry of dramatics and excitement from a spectacle to a snapshot of a cast weighed down with their own individual anguishes and struggles.
Tying it all together is the nameless cleaner, played fantastically by Rowena Le Poer Trench. Never speaking, never judging, and never turning down the volume in her tinny earbuds, she cleans as many emotional messes as she does physical ones. Lo Poer Trench perfectly embodies the frazzled uncertainty of a trainee forced to go beyond their job description by difficult customers, with no manager to turn to whatsoever. Her time is spent tidying up scandal, sometimes hilariously – as in the bridal suite – and sometimes – as with disabled grandfather Gordon (Geoff Atwell) – with devastating tenderness.
Following the carnival of chaos and dramatics, Atwell’s scene in Room 112 comes as a sucker punch to the performance so far. In one of the most painful and human scenes of ‘I Do’, Atwell delivers a masterful performance as a lively family man who – likely as the result of a stroke or accident – can no longer move or speak independently, and is being helped to dress by his wife (Fiona Watson). Frustrated by his own struggles, and by other wedding guests’ discomfort around him, it’s all he can do to cry the second he finds himself alone. Between his expressions, gestures, and even how he finds a way to play pranks through his limitations, Atwell’s performance may be startlingly familiar to anybody with a loved one of a similar experience – and soon becomes one of the most endearing scenes of the production.
With every group starting with a different scene, the end of the round gives every audience a different send off. A clue to the true order of events can be found in the finale, where the audience gathers in the corridor to watch the actors rush from room to room in the minutes before the marriage. In whatever order you experience it in, ‘I Do’ is a surreal carousel of emotions, with a great depth belying its soap-like dramatics and plot twists. Heart wrenching, hilarious, and absolutely unmissable, ‘I Do’ is an event in and of itself.
I Do Dante or Die is at Malmaison Manchester Piccadilly from 19-22 February 2026.