YOU may or may not be fed when you partake of The Last Supper, the Reckless Sleepers' performance piece where the audience is invited to dinner with some famous and not so famous characters.

Part meal, part theatre production, this is the international hit where 13 of the stories to be told in the De Grey Rooms Ballroom in York from tomorrow to Friday will be "last suppers" based on the real-life final meal requests of Death Row inmates.

Those meals will then be served to 13 members of an audience strictly restricted to 39, and not everyone has the stomach to then eat the meal, says Reckless Sleepers' artistic director, Mole Wetherall, whose North West performance company has been touring the world with The Last Supper since 2002.

"Some manage to eat the meals; others don’t; too self-conscious or just plain horrified by the concept and the food sits there accusingly, filling the room with a special aroma," says Mole, the writer and director of a show where he and fellow performers Leen Dewilde and Tim Ingram consume the inmates' last words, written on rice paper.

Reckless Sleepers have been making a meal of theatre since an invitation in 2002. "We were asked by a festival in Ghent – where I live – if we would like to make a last supper. They asked a number of artists if they would make one for the festival; we said yes and I said I'd really like to eat last words. There's a Peter Greenaway film, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover, where the lover gets force-fed a book, and we had this idea of eating rice paper with words on," says Mole.

"Someone came over to us and said he had a list of last meal requests; it just so happened that this information was available and all these years later we're still doing the same show based on it."

The structure of the hour-long show involves the consumption of 52 last moments written on rice paper, 13 of them last meal requests, and those meals will then be prepared and served by theatre students from the University of York St John, where Mole is a visiting lecturer.

"The 13 people in the audience who will be fed will be decided by the ticket number they draw from a bucket, so it's a bit of a lottery, but we tend to find that at the end those people will share the food with everyone else. That pretty much happens everywhere, and everyone gets offered wine or water too," he says.

"As they are Death Row meals, quite a lot of people do feel awkward about the food as it's a last request and that carries weight and significance, but everyone's different. Some people tuck in straightaway.

"I wouldn't say there's any issue with any of the meals, except maybe liver and onions. The last time we did the show in Belgium, someone asked me for the recipe and I could tell them as I'd cooked it."

Over the years, The Last Supper has toured to Australia, Belgium, Holland, Italy, Switzerland and Portugal, always with a maximum audience of 39, but why is it 39 (aside from being three times 13)? "We like to make the show something that's quite intimate, so we have people sitting at three long tables in a U-shape, 13 on each one, with the cast on a top table," says Mole.

Should you be wondering what Mole would like his own last words to be, he says: "I don't remember any of the answers I've ever given, but I know what my last meal request would be. That's easy. Steak and kidney pie with chips and gravy. It's comfort food, and I go to a chip shop just outside Blackpool for it: Seniors Fish and Chip shop. It's the best in the North West."

The Last Supper has never gone stale because Reckless Sleepers do not over-egg it. "We do maybe five venues a year. This year we went to Australia for 13 shows in June and July and every time we do it, we seem to get asked to do it again and so it just carries on," says Mole, who first discussed the possibility of doing The Last Supper in York when he popped in to meet associate director Juliet Forster two years ago.

York finally takes its turn this week, and The Very Last Supper is not on the menu for Reckless Sleepers any time soon. "Next year, we're starting a tour of England, taking it to places like village halls, National Trust properties and the Churches Conservation Trust churches to break new ground for us," says Mole.

"The Last Supper is not everyone's cup of tea but that's the case with other things as well, and we're very happy to continue doing the show while the demand is there."

Food for thought, you might say.

The Last Supper takes place in the De Grey Rooms Ballroom, York Theatre Royal, on Wednesday and Thursday at 7.30pm and Friday at 7pm and 9.15pm. Box office: 01904 623568 or online at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk