A theatrical amuse bouche, James Graham's Relish tells the story of the rise and fall of Victorian celebrity chef, Alexis Soyer (James Walker, excellent), with gusto, and the help of 60 National Youth Theatre actors. Not since Edward Bond's Early Morning has there been such an enjoyably scurrilous stage portrait of Florence Nightingale and Queen Victoria, the latter replete in a crinoline of sieves and soup ladles, and the former a foul-mouthed, hashish-toking bruiser who knows that image is all.
Soyer's story, fleeing Paris and the July Revolution of 1830 for the no less cut-throat world of London society, where he became head chef at the newly founded Reform Club, is chronicled a tad episodically. But the piece has a cartoonish energy, and with appearances by Thackeray, Dickens and Madame Tussaud, Graham neatly suggests that the Victorian era had a celebrity obsession to parallel our own.
James Button's two-tier design cleverly suggests the arrival of the industrial steam age, and Paul Roseby's production deftly conjures all the hustle and bustle of a working kitchen, and features actors playing suckling pigs on spits and plucked chickens, but not, alas, the wafting smells or actual food.
The main stage area, with the audience placed on either side, creates audibility problems, and for all its invention, the production sometimes feels as if it is trying too hard and needs to be allowed to simmer rather than boil all the time. But it's a lively show about a larger-than-life character, and Soyer's relationship with his doomed wife, the celebrated painter, Elizabeth Emma Jones (Hannah Morrish) - like Soyer now largely forgotten – is portrayed with touching understatement.
Until 18 September. Box office: 020-7609 1800.
