This review is from 2013. A new version of I Do returns for 2026 as part of the Barbican’s off-site Scene Change season.
A warren of anonymous hotel rooms is a very apt setting for this site-specific piece from theatre company Dante or Die and writer Chloe Moss. The show is set ten minutes before a couple ties the knot, and hotel rooms of all shapes and sizes across the world must regularly play host to the madness, nerves and complete terror that come ahead of any wedding ceremony.
The piece has groups of audience members being led from one room to another to witness arguments, sex, confusion, hard decisions and love in many of its guises. All of life seems to play out in these few messy rooms as we watch like invisible voyeurs. In one room grandparents get ready – she trying to dress his frail disabled body, he poignantly wordless and excruciatingly frustrated. In another the groom is having second thoughts, and elsewhere we see the best man iron out his (suitably crap) speech.
The events in each space are happening at the same time, but the action is on a loop, so we witness the stories back to back. It’s all wound together with precise timing so that by the end there’s a version close to real-time, and all the pieces of the puzzle begin to slip into place.
Occasionally the logistics of it all make the transitions between rooms a little clunky, and there were a couple of stories I wanted to know a little more about. But that’s the nature of a piece that shows snapshots of life’s raw but beautifully unpredictable moments.
