@ Traverse Theatre, until Sat 24 Oct 2015; and
@ Rockfield Centre, Oban, from Fri 6 Nov to Sun 8 Nov 2015; and
@ Melvich Hotel, Thurso, from Fri 13 Nov to Sun 15 Nov 2015
There’s a lot on the Traverse’s menu this Autumn Season, and a performance for everyone’s tastebuds is the return of one of Grid Iron’s most successful productions. The site-specific specialists serve fourteen delicious courses of love, envy and loss in Ben Harrison’s adaption of Jim Crace’s dark novella The Devil’s Larder. Initially commissioned in Cork in 2005, ten years later, the award winning play takes you on an enchanting path, in their promenade performance at the Custom House, Edinburgh.
Their previous shows Gargantua (1998) and Fermentation (2002) prove this food-obsessed company were the ideal candidates to adapt Crace’s beautifully lyrical writing into a mysteriously charming performance, and to no surprise they are victorious, and are winners of a Scotsman Fringe First and a Herald Archangel, amongst many other awards.
‘Someone has taken off – and lost – the label on the can.’ The story is filled with poetry and imagination, each line that was written is delivered with evocative emotion. We delve into an underworld of the unknown, the unlabelled, the secrets you don’t want to see. A dead cat’s ashes, a Jerusalem artichoke, a frisky fondue party and a honeymooner desperate for an aphrodisiac. ‘I have to share with him something I learnt myself.’ Here, food is it’s own language, more universally understood than sex. A delicious feast of ideas and representations of the human condition and its relationship with food and, most resonant in today’s climate, its relationship with refugees. ‘Until the cart is overloaded with our charity and has become the oddest shopping trolley in the world.’ This is here and now, on earth.
Alongside the mix of four talented actors Johnny Austin, Charlene Boyd, Ashley Smith and Antony Strachan are two musicians, singer David Paul Jones and harpist Mary Macmaster, bringing together narration, live music and song. Claire Halleran’s set, alongside the lights and music, create an aura that invites us to be so intimately close to the dark, but seductive, culinary underworld that we learn of. The versatile performance has seen many locations, but the order of the scenes rely and respond to the architecture of the building. Here at the Custom House, we travel from room to room, chapter to chapter, and hope to fear. The Devil’s Larder is filled with dark poetry of the human condition but with a side plate of wit and quirkiness, which combine to make an endearing piece of theatre.