Isy Suttie’s fantasy dinner: Mary Shelley, Eugène Ionesco and Tom Waits

I’ve never been one for throwing dinner parties. At the last one I attempted, I ended up serving spag bol after losing confidence in the milk-poached chicken I’d planned. There are, of course, endless options in the culinary gulf between the two dishes but I couldn’t think of any. In my panic I forgot to offer anyone a drink, even tap water, until dessert, at which point I discovered I couldn’t make Eton mess because my partner had bought extra-thick cream, so I had to serve crumbled-up meringue and raspberries alongside gobs of cream so cement-like that nobody was able to move for hours afterwards. Which was just as well, because a debate had begun about public versus state school that would go on until 2am, when the sounds of two foxes copulating outside hastened glad tidings of home time.

I hope you understand why I won’t be doing the cooking. Instead, it’s Asma Khan, the Kolkata-born British chef who owns Darjeeling Express, lately of Covent Garden. She’s travelled north this evening to the Bill Murray in Islington, London’s best comedy club. We’re in the green room, up a tiny staircase behind a set of black curtains. Next to us is a kitchen where staff make beans on toast, so Khan must weave her way around two long-haired Australians. She doesn’t mind. She even enlists their help in washing the chickpeas for saag channa masala (spinach with chickpeas) and preparing the marinade for the main course, hariyali murgh (chicken baked with herbs).

I interviewed Khan recently and she was quite taken by the fact that when my daughter Beti, seven, and I made her chapati recipe at home, Beti got the ruler from her pencil case and measured each chapati before it was cooked to check it had the requisite diameter of 15cm. The ruler will be there tonight, as will Beti, because of last-minute childcare problems. This is fine. She’s used to being out at night as she often comes to my stand-up gigs, sitting cross-legged in the wings and keeping a tally in her fluffy notebook of how many times each comic swears. I tell myself it’s an education of sorts.

The two Australians have gone, although the smell of their baked beans lingers and mixes with that of the karai baingan (stir-fried aubergines) Khan is cooking. Beti is busy assisting, so I have a moment to compose myself before welcoming our next guest, singer-songwriter Tom Waits. The second time I saw him live I’d broken up with my long-term boyfriend the previous night. We’d bought the coveted tickets months before and decided to still attend the gig together, which was like going through open heart surgery with no anaesthetic, Waits performing his songs dripping with heartbreak, John and I side by side avoiding eye and bodily contact as we cried silently into our laps.

As the argument crescendoes, Waits finishes his song for Shelley, ‘The Creator, Not the Monster, Baby’

I relay all this to Waits as he ambles in. “That’s living, Isy,” he murmurs. “The rough and the smooth.” “Spot on, Tom!” I squeak, and remember to hand him a drink — a mango and rhubarb lassi prepared by Beti, who asks to measure Tom’s beard with her ruler.

The three of us are so absorbed in discussing whether to measure from the mouth or the chin that I don’t notice my next guest, Mary Shelley, creak up the stairs. She’s on her way to a fancy dress party in a grey and green suit and dark wig with a papier-mâché bolt sticking out of each side of her neck. “Frankenstein!” Waits bellows, opening his arms. “Frankenstein’s monster,” she hisses and says she’ll only forgive him if he writes a song for her. He picks up a guitar lying next to the table and starts up, chastised, eyes sparkling.

You’d expect Shelley to get on terrifically with my final guest, the absurdist playwright Eugène Ionesco, but they come to literary blows almost immediately over whether Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros, about a French village in which virtually everyone turns into a rhinoceros, contains hope for humanity. Shelley says it does, because one character refuses to turn into a rhinoceros, whereas Ionesco maintains that life is utterly meaningless.

Luckily, just as the argument crescendoes, Waits finishes his song for Shelley, “The Creator, Not the Monster, Baby”. Everyone dances on the table, and Shelley becomes so animated that one of her papier-mâché bolts falls into Khan’s rabri (milk dessert). Beti fishes it out before anyone sees and scrambles under the table as the mayhem continues, Shelley pouring port down Ionesco’s neck using a prop funnel that was lying around backstage.

“Mary’s bolt: 5cm,” Beti writes neatly in her notebook. “Swear tally winner: Tom Waits. Complete and utter potty mouth.”

Isy Suttie is at the Soho Theatre, London, from August 22-27, then on tour (dates at isysuttie.co.uk)

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