“It’s impossible not to love someone who makes you toast,” declares the young Nigel Slater (Sam Newton) in Henry Filloux-Bennett’s lovingly filleted stage adaptation of the cookery writer’s memoir. This is a piquant tale of growing up, family tragedy and discovering yourself through baking in 1960s and ‘70s Britain.
It would only be those of the sourest disposition who could not love this bitter-sweet show which in the hands of director and choreographer Jonnie Riordan becomes a delicate and sometimes surreal coming of age romp which is whisked together using the songs and tastes and smells that deliver us straight back to childhood. With all the pleasure and pain that entails.
The smell of toast wafting over the auditorium conjures the mother (Lizzie Muncey) who dies young from an asthma attack and who didn’t like cooking but who painstakingly took the trouble to make jam tarts with the son who she knew loved baking.
When the teenage Nigel invents his first recipe and the smell of garlic mushrooms invades our senses, it adds to the emotion of a moment which operates both as a peace offering to the dead father who couldn’t mould his only son into the manly man he wanted him to be, and also a statement of intent that Nigel will only ever be his own man.
With a design by Libby Watson that offers more kitchen appliances than IKEA, and the cast making their first entrances out of the fridge, this might be dubbed the UK’s first manifestation of scratch and sniff kitchen sink drama. If the confection appears as light and fluffy as the lemon meringue pie created by young Nigel’s stepmother, Joan (Marie Lawrence), a woman who knows how to use food as a lethal weapon of war, there is a great deal more going on beneath its bubbling surface.
It interrogates masculinity and patriarchal attitudes as adeptly as any show on the fringe, and Mark Fleischmann is excellent as Dad making us see a man—who thinks he is doing the best for his son but going about it the wrong way—and not just the monster. This was a man who thought that even sweets came gendered.
This might just have been a slice of nostalgia served up with tempting free sweet treats for the audience (walnut whips), but with a compelling central performance from Sam Newton as the hurt child trying to work out who he is through his taste buds this becomes much more: a story about how the past doesn’t have to make us and how we can cook up ways to escape it.
To 26 August. 0121 228 1404; www.traverse.co.uk
