Chef (Soho Theatre)

A young black woman in chef’s whites stands onstage. She runs her own kitchen – an impressive feat, given a competitive, macho industry – and it means she can cook her own way and express herself on the plate. Hers is a no frills, no foams, as-God-intended approach. She holds up a peach and marvels at it. The Perfect Peach, she says. "Life has made it."

Life has made her too, and what poet-playwright Sabrina Mahfouz’s lyrical monologue – a Fringe First winner last August – doesn’t tell you straight off is the nature of Chef’s kitchen. Her grey jogging bottoms and plimsolls are a hint, but it still takes a while for the penny to drop.

Mahfouz’s writing seduces the listener. She blends up accounts of drug-pushing and gang crime, of domestic abuse and brutal, horrific deaths with flavoursome morsels – mushroom sauces and rhubarb jus, smoked salmon and Manuka honey – that set your saliva glands going. It’s more than a neat trick, though. It’s a challenge: What draws you in? What deserves your attention?

For Chef herself, food is a way out and its presence in the piece stops this being a downbeat drag through a difficult life. She discovers it by chance, rustling up a breakfast for her best friend, and spins of with fresh purpose, but her past proves inescapable. Life makes us as much as we make life.

Jade Anouka plays Chef with real bounce and enthusiasm, light as meringue, and, in Kirsty Patrick-Ward’s crisp production, you can’t help but warm to her. Her voice, in particular, hits you like a heatwave. It’s a voice you feel as well as hear: one of those extra-special low registers with a slight Denchian crack coming through, at present just a husk. It’s a snap, crackle and pop voice, so sonorous that it must travel for miles – like whalesong or sonar.

On top of that, Anouka controls Sabrina Mahfouz’s text like Cristiano Ronaldo does keepie-ups. She’ll savour the sounds, until you can almost taste the ingredients on her recipe card, then whir, full-pace, through the cooking process with more bish, bash, bosh than Jamie Oliver. She is, unequivocally, a pleasure to listen to.

At the same time, though, she’s too young for the part: Anouka’s age confuses the chronology, so you can’t quite unpick how she’s crammed so much in since 16. The breakneck pace isn’t always helpful and Mahfouz has a tendency to gloss over events, occasionally pushing style over substance. Chef’s flavoursome, but it won’t fill you up.

Chef runs at the Soho Theatre until 4 July 2015.