Food

Steve Rodgers has had twenty years of experience working on other writers’ scripts – on stage, film and television – so it is no wonder that he has picked up on some of the clues that make for good writing. Food is just that. There is an insightful economy of words that allows the actors to use all of their skills to show how the characters are feeling. Pauses and looks and gestures work with the words to realise the characters fully and allow the audience to relate with them emotionally and intellectually.

Rodgers and choreographer Kate Champion have combined to direct a very tight production that achieves Force Majeure’s objectives of breaking down the barriers between art forms. Added to the talented acting, there are projections, moody sound, cunningly effective lighting tricks and moments of choreographed, stylised movement. The most moving of these is a touching love scene in which the inner selves of the characters, revealed earlier in the play, come together. Rodgers explains this: “inner thoughts can be explored through body and image, physically, sometimes transcending words”. Champion adds: “Sometimes words aren’t enough and sometimes dance isn’t specific enough”.

Together with their cast, they have produced a very interesting piece of theatre. On the surface, it is about two sisters who decide to convert their ‘greasy spoon’ take-away food shop into a restaurant. In reality it is a play about memory and how the past infiltrates the present and affects the future. Mel King and Emma Jackson play the sisters Elma and Nancy. As with many sisters, they are very different.

Elma, the long-suffering elder of the two, has stayed at home and taken over the shop. She is grounded but disillusioned. Her dialogue is stilted at times, short, busy – wistful. King finds every nuance of this in voice, facial expression, impatient movements and strained reactions. She embodies the heavy weight of repressed emotion that Elma carries.

Nancy has just come home after some time away. She is pretty, appears carefree, but there is something brittle in her brightness. Jackson shows all of this in her first scene, a choreographed segment, where her sinuous movements mix the bright and the brittle, smooth and willowy one moment, tight and constrained the next. She sustains this throughout the play, reaching and re-connecting with Elma by recalling memories of their adolescence.

Together they bury some of the past and create a possible future.

All that being said, this play is not sad or depressing. Moments of remembered pain are tempered with sisterly affection, and the arrival of Turkish kitchen hand, Hakan, played by Fayssal Bazzi, brings humour and a lot of fun.

In Hakan, Rodgers has created a character that brings out the humour of those to whom English as a second language is daunting and a little confusing, as well as introducing a character that is perceptive and engaging. Hakan sees the strain and distance between the sisters and uses his sense of fun to bring them together. Bazzi finds all of this in his portrayal of Hakan. He entrances the sisters and the audience. With his cute jokes and funny lines. His timing and delivery are impeccable.

Anna Tregloan’s set works perfectly and ‘works’ is the operative word! The backdrop is hung with 46 miscellaneous frying pans and saucepans. Around the stage there are another 28 saucepans and boilers, all of which are used during the production, some as cooking pots, some as seats, others hide props. Two are used as mirrors of the past. As Elma and Nancy look into them, filmic memories flicker up to their faces. Lights are directed to catch the polished bases of cookware above the stage in scenes that are dimmer and more melancholy.

Writing, direction, acting and technology blend creatively in this carefully conceived play about family and relationships and love and disappointments.

Carol Wimmer

Photographer: Heidrun Löhr