Some say all theatre is about sex or death. It’s certainly the case in this adaptation of Jim Crace’s short-story collection. Rarely does a scene pass in Ben Harrison’s sumptuous production, revived by Grid Iron for a 10th-anniversary site-responsive tour, without some erotic subtext or intimation of mortality.
The ostensible theme is food. As we climb the grand staircase of the UK’s oldest purpose-built custom house and promenade through its featureless rooms, we follow a sequence of scenes involving everything from an unlabelled tin can full of culinary possibilities to a community store-cupboard collection for hungry refugees. Performed by four actors and two musicians, these scenes are drily ironic, often quirky and sometimes dark.
In so many of them, we see food as an agent of sensuality. We see it in Ashley Smith as an eastern European hotel maid fantasising about the contents of the empty plates she collects from outside the bedroom doors. It’s in a 1970s fondue party that switches from forced social pleasantries into an orgy of bare bellies and big underpants. And it’s in the honeymoon awakening of Charlene Boyd as a young bride whose discovery of an aphrodisiac fruit becomes a private pleasure.
Set against these images of food as a generator of life is the opposite idea. There’s Boyd’s bereaved old woman literally consuming her grief, one sprinkle of her husband’s ashes at a time. There’s Antony Strachan at death’s door in a doctor’s surgery while Jerusalem artichokes grow inside him. And there’s Johnny Austin relishing a grisly tale of a food-poisoning fatality in a Highland hotel.
In tone, the show comes across as less frivolous than on its last outing, at an after-hours Debenhams department store in 2005. That was fun, but with less of a novelty setting, there’s more room for poignancy and pathos alongside the bodily appetites.
- At Custom House, Edinburgh, until 24 October. Box office: 0131-228 1404. Then touring.
