Clout Feast

Clout Theatre: Feast

The centre of the stage is filled with soil. Three almost-naked bodies. It rains, they get wet, the soil turns to mud. They get very dirty, their bare skin and the skimpy bits of muslin cloth preserving their modesty (more or less) coated in mud. It’s a mess, a filthy bloody mess.

So that’s the first two minutes of Clout’s new show Feast, which explores our relationship to food.

And you can’t talk about food without talking about agriculture, human toil, the ethics of farming, our relationship to the natural world. Not that any of this discussion takes place using words, or in a reductive polemical way. Instead, we are fed a fabulous feast of visual imagery, which we gobble up with greedy delight.

Cast out from the garden of Eden, or emerging from the swamp, or risen from the plains of the African savannah (choose your own favourite creation myth), our newly-soiled human trio – one Adam and two Eves – walk in an endless circle around the stage, each with their their ankle tied to what looks like a tin bowls with a hole in the bottom, waving cutlery aloft. There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Lisa. Then fix it, dear Henry. Necessity is the mother of invention, and it is time to be inventive, or you’ll starve. The tin bowls become hats. Hat bowls. This section of the show is called Breakfast, so of course there are cornflakes. Pouring down from on high; manna from the gods.

Lunch is served! Civilisation has arrived! At the rear of the stage is a table, bedecked in white linen. And black plastic bags, ripped open. Behold the feast within! Absurdly large napkins are tucked in, looking like backless nightdresses. On your marks, get set, go! It’s a medieval banquet. There are food duels enacted by jousting knights on prancing horses and there are courtly dances, and seduction. It’s a party, a wedding, a sumptuous orgy of food. But who is diner and who is dinner?

Ah yes, Dinner. Things get darker. Literally as the stage dims, now lit by the screen on the rear wall. And metaphorically. Food has become something else altogether. Something more and something less. Something that needs to be processed, manipulated. The linen and luscious spread go, the large table becomes three smaller ones. Live feed video focuses on the activities of each of the three performers at their stations. It’s like some sort of dystopian TV cookery show. There is raw, naked chicken. There is clingfilm. There are white latex gloves. There are close-ups on distended orifices (human and animal). My, what big teeth you have!

Feast takes us back to the glory days of 1970s Performance Art – and I mean that in the best possible way. On the day before I’d seen Clout’s show, I’d taken in the blood-and-guts of the Hermann Nitsch exhibition at Summerhall. Feast, in its very different way, seems to match Nitsch’s aim to ‘understand the context of dionysian in a more up-to-date way’. But it is also dark clown, and adroit physical theatre.

It’s a highly satisfying offering. The three-part structure offers us a snapshot of the human journey from gatherer to farmer to food industry processor. Within this structure, which gives a necessary framing to the subject matter, there’s a whole smorgasbord of ideas about our relationship with food. Underlying it all is the question of the link between our methods of feeding ourselves and our notions of civilisation.

The three actors onstage give vibrant, robust and entertaining performances. The sound design is excellent – the soundscape complements the physical action and visual tableaux beautifully, veering from djembe drumming to rumba to tango to the dark drone of industrial machinery. Lighting is similarly spot-on.

The only thing marring the show is nothing to do with Clout: the new upstairs space at Zoo has metal balustrades along the front of the seating. Really not good for sightlines for a piece of visual theatre. But this is the Fringe, and these things happen.

That aside, a marvellous experience. I left feeling fully feasted, happily digesting the delights I’d been fed.

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Dorothy Max Prior

About Dorothy Max Prior

Dorothy Max Prior is the editor of Total Theatre Magazine, and is also a performer, writer, dramaturg and choreographer/director working in theatre, dance, installation and outdoor arts. Much of her work is sited in public spaces or in venues other than regular theatres. She also writes essays and stories, some of which are published and some of which languish in bottom drawers – and she teaches drama, dance and creative non-fiction writing. www.dorothymaxprior.com