Two years ago, a number of the playlets
in Belarus Free Theatre’s
Eurepica
compilation utilised food in making comments about human and
environmental abuses. This approach drives the whole of
Trash Cuisine, which I am afraid
sees this brave company (banned from performing and regularly
imprisoned in their homeland, Europe’s last dictatorship) lose much of
both its defiant playfulness and its authority.
The piece’s episodes, based on true stories of judicial and
extra-judicial executions and torture around the world, mostly follow
the same broad template: wordless physical sequences depicting either
abuse or analogues of it, in parallel with food (actual or imagined)
being prepared or eaten, atop a narration of real events (live,
audio-recorded or projected in text captions). Little of it, however,
strikes us in a new enough way to jolt us out of our compassion fatigue.
Some of it is just plain puzzling: why, for instance, portray Clive
Stafford-Smith’s recorded account of the execution of Nicky Ingram in
Georgia, U.S.A. as lip-synched by upmarket diners and supper-lounge
jazz musicians? It might be intended to make the point that these
activities and those take place in the same world, but does it not also
look plain flippant? At another point, Stephanie Pan shows herself an
able
taiko drummer, but her
performance is given no context of any kind and so seems quite
meaningless. When the piece might hit a British audience hardest – when
it deals with the last death sentence passed in this country, against a
man convicted of the murder of a soldier in Northern Ireland in 1973 (a
conviction obtained using torture, commuted to imprisonment and later
quashed) – it makes the bizarre claim that only 467 deaths occurred
during the Troubles, a figure which by any remotely comprehensive count
is some 3000 too low. (More than that number were killed in 1972 alone.)
So much of the work on show here has been done before and better; Pan’s
sequence of “impersonating” various methods of execution manages,
disconcertingly, to echo the early work of both British comedian Al
Murray and American musician Diamanda Galás. As I say, the Free Theatre
themselves have visited this performance territory before. The final
sequence of the (overlong) 100-minute piece entails chopping up
industrial quantities of onions; the company may, I suppose, be
parodying themselves and recognising their need to elicit our tears
artificially.
Written for the Financial
Times.