Leo Benedictus reportsIN this circular auditorium every kind of smile is now on show, from gleeful through bemused and all the way to ghastly. Halfway through the performance, a woman near me turns to her elderly relative and grins: “You have to experience everything in life.” “Yes, ” he replies with regret. We sip a murky infusion of green tea, mint and sake and watch the UK premiere of Patatboem, a “culinary concert” of food and jazz from Belgium. What this means is a team cooking, singing, dancing and playing instruments on stage, who somehow transform a pile of ingredients and utensils into a hot meal for everyone at the end of it. “There is a very similar concentration and energy in a band when they’re performing and a kitchen in full service, ” explains Peter de Bie. After developing his first idea in the 1980s – to grow an edible tablecloth from cress – de Bie moved on to a cooking peepshow, in which diners peered through gaps in the wall at a revolving kitchen chamber. “For me, food is really the starting point, ” he says. “For others, I think food is maybe a metaphor, a way to talk about other things. But most of the work I do is about the kind of relationship you have with it.” De Bie takes his work seriously. When we finish talking he runs off to fetch a crate full of cookbooks, from which he lends me volume four, number one of the academic journal Performance Research. It is covered in the freshly sharpened pencil marks of an attentive reader. Including Patatboem, three shows are opening in London this month that involve preparing food on stage. “It’s a wonderful way of involving an audience, ” says Robin Soans, writer of The Arab-Israeli Cookbook, a play set in Israel, which opens at the Gate theatre. “You can’t get anything more domestic than cooking. It’s essential to everybody’s life on both sides. It holds your day together.” Soans’s project came from an idea by its co-directors, Tim Roseman, who is Jewish, and Rima Brihi, who is half-Lebanese, to dramatise the lives of people in Israel, both Arabs and Jews. It occurred to Soans that food would work as a medium in which both sides could talk without recrimination. So he visited the country to interview people in their homes and collect recipes. The play involves the preparation of four dishes on stage, the star of the show being an Arab speciality called kusa mahshi u waraq dawali, a dish of stuffed courgettes and vine leaves which is prepared by Sheila Hancock in the first half and comes out of the oven at the end of the play. Soans admits that his play might send audiences “rushing to the nearest kebab shop”. There will be an accompanying recipe book, so people can taste at home what they’ve smelled. Food can be a powerful lens through which to examine wider cultural differences, too. This was something Renny O’Shea discovered when she went to someone’s home in Eritrea for dinner. They served her chicken, which she knew to be a special treat, so she put aside her vegetarianism and ate it. “It was horrible, ” she says. “But there was no way that I was going to say no. You don’t go to Eritrea for the food.” O’Shea is the creator and director of a show called EatEat, which was originally devised with refugees and asylum seekers in Leicester and is now being re-created with immigrants in Gent in Belgium. The title comes from the Eritrean tradition in which the host places food directly in his guest’s mouth, saying mbla mbla, which means “eat eat”, to which the guest must reply eum, which means “it’s delicious”. In EatEat, a huge round table, eight metres across, seats all 10 performers and 30 spectators. The evening consists of a meal, during which people from Turkey, Burkina Faso and Iran swap jokes, stories and songs in their own languages. “It’s fantastic to see how much we have in common, ” says O’Shea, “and how much is really different – the way that we eat, and what the etiquette of mealtimes is.” Choreographing a performance that is also a dinner for 40 can be a stressful business. “It’s incredibly technical to get the timings right so that everything arrives at the same time, ” says O’Shea. “It’s like in a restaurant, I suppose. But here, if we build up to a moment and then the food doesn’t arrive, then there’s nothing to fill it. It’s really terrifying.” Nessim Zohar has no such trouble with his one-man show, My Mother’s Soup, which opens at the New End theatre in Notting Hill on June 29. It is the story of a man around his age (he’s now 67), a Jewish Egyptian like him, who grew up in Alexandria, and in the play makes his mother’s favourite soup for the first time since he was seven. Zohar prepares the meal from chicken, rice and molokhia, a green plant known as Jew’s mallow, and serves it to the audience at the end. This interactive element came as an afterthought to Zohar. “When I started doing the play, I had this idea of how futile it all is and I thought that at the end of the play I’d just say, ‘Ah well, she’s gone. Nothing really matters.’ And I would throw the soup into the bin. But there was a riot. The audience was about to stone me to death – they wanted the soup. So I started serving it.”
(from The Guardian) Notes Eritrea – an area in Ethiopia in NE Africa which was in a state of famine and war for many years Leicester – a city in Leicestershire where the local government for that county is based Notting Hill – an area of west London. It is known for a street carnival that takes place in August every year, mostly involving black people Burkina Faso – a country in West Africa. The former name of the country was Upper Volta
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