You know the feeling when you turn up at a restaurant looking for a meal just before the kitchen is about to close? You smile ingratiatingly and the waiter gives you a table anyway. You feel he is a personal friend for letting you in.
I am oozing similar warm feelings after bagging a ticket to one of the final performances of Arnold Wesker's 1959 play in the Olivier theatre. I went to my favourite fish and chip restaurant in Waterloo Road beforehand, to make sure I didn't see the play on an empty stomach. Bijan Sheibani, the director, 'worked as a waiter for one day in 2000, before spilling wine over a customer, after which he agreed to leave'. So it says in the National Theatre programme, and I can only say Mr Sheibani, whose work I haven't seen before, made the right choice by moving into theatre instead of catering. This is a highly intelligent production of a rather tricky play. His revival of the Kitchen follows hard on the heels of the Royal Court's meticulously naturalistic production of another early Wesker play, Chicken Soup with Barley, earlier this year.
Sheibani and his team, notably set designer Giles Cadle, move smoothly in and out of the naturalistic mode in a way that makes the play much richer. There's a cast of 30 and a huge set with real 1950s ovens and gas ranges, and a battery of pots and pans. The approach appears to be hyper-realistic, but then as the cooking brigade arrive and get to work, one notices something a bit odd. There's no food in sight -- the frying pans may sizzle with the occasional drop of olive oil and there's a bit of steam rising from the saucepans, but the plates and the dishes are otherwise empty. We, the audience just have to use our imagination, and a very good thing too.
My first instinct was to wonder whether cuts in arts funding had finally reached the South Bank. Perhaps they had real veal chops and turbot at the start of the run (to keep the critics happy) but the National's refrigerator was now empty? I remember distinctly that when Clare Higgins cooked a meal in the Cottesloe a few years ago in Nicholas Wright's Vincent in Brixton, the leg of lamb that emerged from the oven was real. I know -- I was there and I smelt it. So perhaps the absence of real food was the result of a Nicholas Hytner economy drive? There was a tell-tale warning sign earlier this year in the Lyttelton when the normally well-nourished James Corden was forced to ask the audience for a sandwich during One Man, Two Guv'nors. I was forced to abandon my theory about cuts, however, when I consulted the West End Whingers' review from early September, when the play opened. 'Tragically, there wasn't a veal cutlet or a potato in sight,' they reported. Apparently Wesker himself specified that real food wasn't necessary, so my suspicions turned out to be without foundation.
The dividing line between realism and non-realism is one of theatre's most creative faultlines; in this play Sheibani exploits it to the full, switching from naturalism to a choreographed ballet with echoes of Busby Berkeley, as waitresses and chefs spin faster and faster around the giant circular stage. Above all, he knows how to vary the pace, slowing down some scenes so that the unbearably long pauses are reminiscent of Pinter. Wesker's script is at its strongest in the second act when the pace slows down and the kitchen staff, resting between the lunchtime and the evening service, begin to relax. There are too many characters in this play to allow most of them the chance to develop, but there is a standout performance by Tom Brooke as the German fish chef Peter, the only one of the team who knows how to dream of another kind of life. He's the one who finally cracks up, which tells us that dreaming too much probably isn't a good idea, either back in 1959 or now.
The play is presented in the programme as something of a period piece, with a printed menu at 1959 prices (meat dishes five shillings) but I think this misses its universality. While the revival of Chicken Soup with Barley opened a window on a vanished historical world, The Kitchen's theme is bang up to date. The recipes and the prices have changed, but the mundane and repetitive world of work has remained much the same. I was ten years old in 1959, so take my word for it.
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