Opening a production about the world’s
imminent food disaster in the middle of Europe’s present refugee crisis
is at once topical – in that our attitude towards our own confort is
the problem – and an unfortunate misfire: right arrow, wrong target.
Nevertheless, Metta Theatre’s package of six short plays (plus a droll
musical number about the delights of eating insects) is sporadically
trenchant.
It starts slowly, with
Organica
by Colombia’s Pedro Miguel Rozo observing youthful idealism clashing
with the realities of past upheavals, and Bola Agbaje providing an
entertaining but slight two-hander between a health-obsessive and his
less concerned girlfriend in
Chocolate.
The package hits cruising speed with
Bread
On The Table, in which Lydia Adetunji sharply intercuts a London
business meeting with a Tunisian scene of desperation to compare and
contrast perspectives on one of our most staple foodstuffs. The
self-consciously over-the-top line “You can’t fight tear gas with a
baguette!” encapsulates both the absurdity of the idea and the grim
reality that sometimes that is, in effect, what things come down to.
Bleak extremity is also the keynote of Clare Bayley’s
The Protectors, set in a near
future when the food sector has become so polluted and/or corporatized
that eating naturally grown potatoes is an act of political defiance.
Director Poppy Burton-Morgan has saved her two biggest hitters for
after the interval (and the cricket-eating number).
16 Pounds is Neil LaBute at his
most unremitting, a relentless power play in which an official taunts a
civilian who has turned in his children for two gallons of water;
however, it tells us less about ecological catastrophe than about
LaBute’s view of humanity. Inua Ellams’
Turned is the most dramatically
engaging of the half-dozen, and perhaps coincidentally the least
apocalyptic, portraying a young British man’s journey to war-torn
northern Nigeria in search of a former student friend.
Of the four actors, the older – Doņa Croll and Robert Hands – are the
most assured (in Hands’ case, wryly so), although Alisha Bailey also
turns in a strong clutch of performances from the naīve young Colombian
to LaBute’s psychological torturer. But the evening never quite escapes
the zone of worthy high-concept.
Written for the Financial
Times.