Review: Food (Finborough Theatre)

In Steve Rodgers’ play, food can be a comfort, a crutch; it can be used to assert control over others, or to bring people together. Set in a takeaway food outlet in Tasmania, two sisters feel the heat in the kitchen: the beautiful Nancy, who’s always had something about her which attracts men like flies, returns home after disappearing for years; Elma, who’s held the fort in her absence, is tough and resentful. This dynamic, we see in flashbacks, goes back to their teenage years.

Initially, Food is painfully shouty: these two are at each other’s throats, and dredging up the past, before they’ve finished chopping a single potato. It all feels terribly strenuous in Cressida Brown’s production; while the kitchen, evoked nattily with wheelable white goods and fryers, is supposed to be claustrophobic, it’s the play that doesn’t feel allowed to breath.

However, Emma Playfair as the bitter, hard-bitten Elma and Lily Newbury-Freeman as the beguiling, languorous Nancy eventually find a calmer rhythm as the show settles down. Still, it was always going to be a bit of an uphill struggle with the Australian playwright’s predictable script.

The sisters decide to open a restaurant; yes, they bond over this shared project, Elma’s talents at cooking up comfort food finally finding a healthy outlet. They need a pot-washer and who should show up but a charismatic young man, a Turkish traveller named Hakan; yes, Elma is initially resistant towards him but he eventually softens her. Indeed, while Food may centre on the relationships between two sisters, its vision of feminine identity always seems to come back to the way they’re treated by men.

If early flashbacks feel overcooked in stagey childishness, later reflections and enactments of teenage traumas acquire a greater depth, and are sensitively handled by both actresses. Scott Karim as Hakan brings a burst of energy mid-way through, shaking up the show like the character shakes up their lives and chattily breaking the fourth wall. He’s romantic, amusing, a lover of food and other sensual pleasures, and not much more than a plot device. Did we really need his entire sexual history delivered as if different women in the audience were his 11 previous shags? There are surely less crudely cataloguing ways of attempting to bolster a character with backstory, and anyway we get the message from Karim’s twinkling performance: this guy just really loooooves women.

This is the first production of Rodgers’ plays outside of Australia, but while the cast work hard, Food hardly leaves you hungry for more.

Food is at the Finborough until 15 July.