What must it be like to eat cold Chinese takeaway food seven times a week, all in the service of art? As far as I can tell, that's what the cast of Alexi Kaye Campbell's excellent new play Apologia have to put up with at the Bush. "I'd avoid this one if I were you. It tastes a little funny," says one of the characters, wrinkling his nose. He thinks he's seen a fingernail nestling in the beef with oyster sauce. Not surprisingly, the local takeaway doesn't get a credit in the programme for Josie Rourke's production.
I saw a matinee performance of this show, and realised with a shudder that the PBA (poor bloody actors) would have to eat the same meal again in the evening. Doesn't Equity have rules about this sort of thing? And what about health and safety?
That set me thinking about great meals I've seen on stage. Theatrical characters are always pouring themselves drinks, and there are plenty of plays in which the cocktail cabinet is almost a member of the cast. We all know the whisky isn't real. But eating food on stage is a different matter; it's harder to fake than drinking, and there are lots of opportunities for it to go wrong. Many playwrights skip lunch or dinner scenes altogether, concentrating on the easy option of a family row in the drawing room and postponing dinner to the interval. But I like the ones which don't duck the challenge. Eating can be dramatically significant, which I'm sure was Shakespeare's defence when someone from the Elizabethan equivalent of the Daily Mail objected to the cannibalism scene in Titus Andronicus.
Two of my favourite dinner scenes have taken place at the National, which of course has the resources to do things properly. If Nick Hytner wants a real Aga on stage or a real kitchen sink, he gets it. I remember the delicious smell of Lia Williams's cooking wafting over the audience as she prepared a simple spag bol for her old flame Michael Gambon in David Hare's Skylight. I suspect the characters went off to bed after eating it. (Sir David was right to leave the sex offstage and concentrate on the cooking instead.)
Pasta also figured in Lee Hall's brilliant version of Goldoni's The Servant of Two Masters at the Young Vic a few years ago. I recall Jason Watkins serving great bowls of it, not just to the actors on stage but to the spectators in the front row as well. I suppose that sort of mad extravagance wouldn't happen today.
My all-time favourite onstage meal, however, was in Nicholas Wright's play Vincent in Brixton at the Cottesloe in 2002. Clare Higgins played Vincent van Gogh's London landlady and served up a real leg of roast lamb. The overwhelming smell no doubt contributed to the fact that the Olivier award judges, me included, picked Vincent in Brixton as our best new play of the year.
