Food opens tonight in Brisbane

The third offering on the La Boite menu for the 2013 Season is the new Australian play Food by Steve Rodgers, which opens in the Roundhouse Theatre tonight.

The play is about two sisters who run the family takeaway joint out in a middle-of-nowhere stretch of Australian highway. The two girls’ dream of owning a restaurant come true when a charming Turkish traveller makes a pit-stop, adding a little spice to their life.

Inspired by real people in real situations, Food explores the contrasts of our multicultural country and the conflicting emotions we sometimes feel when we are faced with food, and sex.

The concept developed when Rodgers went home to where he grew up, in a large country town in Tasmania.

“I started to dissect the roles I’d been cast in both by my family situation, and also with my peers and friends. It got me thinking – is it our nature that determines our actions? That whole nature versus nurture thing. Are you the person you’re told to be, or the person you make yourself into? Food is an exploration of identity in terms of your past”, he said.

[pull_left]Food is a feast for the senses with an erotic mix of words and movement that will spice and stir in equal parts.[/pull_left]

Food is a play that defies genre; part cooking show, part dinner party, part dance theatre. Some lucky audience members even become restaurant guests as the sisters serve up a hearty minestrone soup, sour dough with local wines.

Food is a feast for the senses with an erotic mix of words and movement that will spice and stir in equal parts.

Co-directed by Kate Champion and Steve Rodgers, Food is a collaboration between Force Majeure and Sydney’s Belvoir company, mixing elements of physical theatre, drama and comedy.

Rodgers always saw the script to develop as a physical piece, and incorporate the total elements of theatre. “It’s a naturalistic story, but it has a magical way of telling itself”.

With Champions’ background in dance-theatre, it is an obvious pairing for the collaboration.

“I think the two art forms speak to each other, in that sometimes words just aren’t enough for me. In some ways, film has always been able to achieve that through the visual elements. The more we rely on gesture and image and the body in theatre, the better”, Champion said.

The show features actor-collaborators Fayssal Bazzi, Kate Box & Emma Jackson. Rodgers described the unique creative process in which everybody collaborated and owned the story together.

“Usually there’s a power structure in the making of theatre that I don’t think serves it best. But in this one everyone involved got a part of themselves in the show. We all own it. Even though Kate is boss!”

Note: Contains coarse language, adult themes and simulated sexual intercourse.

For more information on this new Australian work which has just been shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, (Nick Enright Prize for Playwriting), see the La Boite’s website: laboite.com.au