At the entrance of Brisbane festival’s Fear & Delight theatre and dining show, guests are greeted by a woman in black lipstick, holding out a pile of sparkly, gold capsules in her gloved hand. “Swallow this,” she urges us.
Pushing aside memories of my days as a teen raver, I take one and gulp it down.
“What was that?” I whisper to the woman. She gives me a closer look. Each pill is filled with glitter.
I feel mildly disappointed, then hit by a flash of concern. Is glitter even edible? (Later I hear a woman exclaim: “we’ll all be pooping gold!”)
It was glitter. #FearAndDelight #BrisFest pic.twitter.com/tfYkcqsPqF
— Monica Tan (@m_onicatan) September 9, 2015
No time to worry about that now, though; there are more gastric mysteries to be had inside the tent. From a wooden box protrudes a hand, occasionally offering guests a shiny, deep-purple grape. Plastic bags of ink-black liquid sit on a large candlelit table, with barber-striped straws inviting anyone who dares take a sip.
For five bucks a pop, a man in priest’s robes pours out an unlabelled red liquid from a beaker. I watch guest Nina Traber from Switzerland pay and down her shot. “I have no idea what I’m drinking!” she exclaims. “It was good, very tasty. Bit sour.”
The man hands her a white envelope, to be opened at “her own pleasure”. She rips it apart and we laugh when she finds a crisp five-dollar note staring back at her.
Inside we are seated in long rows around the stage and directed to inject a shot of tomato consommé into our mouth. Waiters begin to serve 15-hour slow-cooked lamb, roasted vegetables and golden polenta. There are brushes for us to paint onto our plates a black garlic aoili sauce and mint jelly served from tin cans.
Chicken off the bone, dripping in juices, its head and feet still intact, is delicious – although a few guests seem fazed when feed is scattered on the stage and two live chickens (hopefully no relation) begin happily pecking away.
Is this the point at which festival foodie culture in Australia jumps the shark? By far the most popular event at Tasmania’s Dark Mofo each year is its medieval-esque winter feast. Elsewhere, food trucks have become a festival mainstay and events like Peninsula Picnic put music and food on equal footings.
But it was Sydney’s TedX this year that truly upped the stakes in conceptual dining, with guests treated to buttered bread sprinkled with a handful of ant carcasses, and ash cakes with clotted cream and bone-marrow marmalade.
Back in Brisbane, after a high-energy performance by circus-cabaret artists The Correspondents, I end the night in the tent’s gin and tonic vapour chamber. It is designed by UK culinary artists Bompas and Parr, famed for their giant sculptures made of jelly. This latest project, dubbed “alcoholic architecture”, is described as “a gin and tonic based weather system for your tongue”.
We are given biohazard-style suits to wear, and asked by attendant Roxanne Walker to “please don’t lick the walls”. I’m incredulous someone has actually done that. She has also seen guests battle rap and do dance-offs inside.
We enter a shipping container lit in a calming blue and filled with a slightly sweet, slightly tart cocktail fog. Everyone is giggling. Even though we have been told it takes an hour to soak in one standard drink, and we will only have five minutes, there’s a strange and wonderful novelty in drinking through your lungs, your eyeballs – the alcohol passing straight into your bloodstream.
Guest Renee Harper is all grins and says “it’s kind of nice. Taking a deep breath and the taste on your tongue.” Her friend Kiera Doherty nods, and says she can pick up “a little bit of juniper, that tartness”. (Later on we will head to the bar and share liquid G&Ts. They taste vaguely coarse and the flavours muted after having inhaled its perfume form.)
Our five minutes expires far too quickly, and as we take off our suits outside, I ask Walker what is the longest time she’s spent inside. She says that even after an hour and half, it takes so long for one drink to pass through the body that the effect is minimal. Guests get silly because of “the placebo effect” more than anything.
That’s the magic of Fear & Delight, she says, this feeling you are “walking into an entirely different world”.
“You take the pill, which is sort of like going down the rabbit hole. Then there are all these incredible experiences, fun hidey-holes and little secret things happening. It’s exactly what you want when you go out for a dinner and a show.”
- Fear & Delight runs until 25 September at Brisbane festival
