Leo Burtin calls his theatre show The Midnight Soup an “edible memorial” to his grandmother, Josette.
When Josette died in 2012, his family called to give him the news. Burtin initially assumed that her death had resulted from a fall. But he found out she had killed herself. “The Midnight Soup,” he says, is “a way of making a presence out of absence, of celebrating her quiet life and creating a conversation around death and suicide”.
The process of making theatre is often likened to cooking, with much sourcing and chopping of ingredients, and ideas being stirred in and simmered. But Burtin’s show really is cooked – and not just by him. It’s a shared act of creation. During a performance that begins as a monologue, and which slowly and organically develops into a conversation, we all make a vegetarian soup together: cutting vegetables and garlic – lots and lots of garlic – and gradually turning up the heat so that the smells fill the room like memory itself. Grief gradually becomes apparent too – quietly at first and then, at the performance I witnessed, bubbling up more noisily as people shared their own stories of loss.
Burtin was born and raised in north-east France and has lived in the UK since 2010. Food was central to his upbringing in a rural landscape fought over and scarred by two world wars and where Burtin says it is impossible to “go for a walk in the woods without seeing remnants of the past. It’s a place where memory is vividly present all around you.” Not surprisingly, Burtin’s work draws heavily on memory and the act of trying to hold on to it. And what is more evocative of childhood memories than the food we grew up with? Food is part of our cultural identity. It was Josette who taught Burtin to cook as a teenager, creating a strong bond between grandmother and grandson.
“We always sat down to dinner together. The dinner table was the place where we would talk and exchange the stories of our lives, and if there was silence it was felt. My grandmother’s relationship to the family was built around cooking and eating food.”
The show takes its name from a rich soup from the Alsace region, designed to be served as a hungover cure towards the end of a boozy evening during the festive season. When I saw the work in progress at Slung Low’s The Hub in Holbeck in Leeds in July, it was clear that this is a piece that is cleverly and subtly constructed. The act of chopping the vegetables and preparing the soup is soothing and provides a clever distraction so that the emotions creep up almost unnoticed. There is lots of laughter before the tears.
The Midnight Soup creates a discourse around suicide, raising the possibility that it can be seen as a rational act; in Josette’s case, an unwillingness to see her life confined by increasing physical frailty and the fear of mental decline.
“Of course I still grapple with a sense of guilt and wonder about what kind of society we have that we can’t take care of our elders,” says Burtin. “But I suppose I would like to see what my grandmother did, not as an act of despair, but a choice. I’m drawn to the idea that suicide can be seen not as a permanent solution to a temporary problem but a rational, thought-out decision. But this isn’t a piece with any answers, and I definitely don’t have any point I want to make. When it comes to assisted suicide – something that is often raised by people around the table – I don’t have a specific opinion. This is just creating the space to think about these things and talk about them together over food we’ve made together.”
One of the pleasures of The Midnight Soup is that it is as much about living as dying. It concentrates on Josette’s quiet rural existence, attuned to the changing seasons and the rhythms of rural French village life. Burtin quotes TS Eliot’s The Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock, raising the possibility that a life measured out with coffee spoons may, rather contrary to received wisdom, be a life fulfilled.
He also quotes from Josette’s diary, a daily record not of momentous events but of the weather, and what she bought at the supermarket. There is a poetry of banality in these entries; a sense of a textured inner life lurking beneath the mundane.
“There is nothing in the least extraordinary about the diary entries. But you do take away the sense that she is saying: ‘I am here. These are how many carrots I’ve cut and this is how many cups of tea I’ve had. I am here, and it’s worth what it’s worth.’ I like that.”
I like the fact that the piece, simply and without any fuss or forcing, makes a community out of a group of complete strangers. The format encourages and supports an emotional openness: at the performance in Leeds, the stories that emerged from around the table were offered up with generosity. It was as if, in the space of two and half hours, we had become old friends.
There is a lot of theatre around at the moment in which artists draw upon their family histories and personal relationships. I wonder whether Burtin has considered the ethics of what he is doing, and how the rest of his family might feel about him making a piece based on his grandmother’s life and death?
“Of course I’ve thought about it. All the time. My grandmother gave the diary to me. I’ve paid a lot of care and attention to be respectful to her and not to share anything from it that I think she might not have wanted to be shared. My immediate family know what I’m doing. But I haven’t asked for their consent because they are not my grandmother. She’s the only person whose consent really matters and she can’t give it. So I just have to step very, very carefully, every step of the way. Because she’s not here to ask.”
• The Midnight Soup is at ARC, Stockton, on 14 October. Box office: 01642 525 199. Then touring.
• In the UK, the Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is on 13 11 14. Hotlines in other countries can be found here.
