Food glorious food – here’s Dorothy Max Prior with an Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2024 taster menu, featuring Sean Wai Keung with A History of Fortune Cookies, Traverse/Soho Theatre production My English Persian Kitchen, and Ugly Bucket’s Stuffed

Food and theatre have a lot in common, am I right? Both are about sharing – community through communion.

I’ve always been a sucker for shows that involve real-time cooking and eating. And there have been a fair few ’foodie’ shows seen over the years in Edinburgh, during the festival month of August. Off the top of my head, there was Geoff Sobelle’s Food a couple of years ago, which (in keeping with Sobelle’s anarchic clown persona) was a somewhat surreal banquet; and quite a few years earlier, Peta Lily directed Karola Gajda in My Polish Roots, in which a rather marvellous root-vegetable Borscht was made onstage whilst Karola’s Polish heritage was explored. Grid Iron gave us The Devil’s Larder, Curious were On the Scent, and Lemon Bucket Orkestra were Counting Sheep whilst inviting us to a wedding feast. Beyond Edinburgh, many and various artists and companies – from Kindle Theatre to Karavan Ensemble, Odin Teatr to Akhe, Leo Kay to Fevered Sleep – have invited us to feast our eyes and dine with them.

And now, in this 2024 festival season, here we are again. Come dine with me, say the theatre-makers!

For starters, here’s Sean Wai Keung with A History of Fortune Cookies. As we enter a small and somewhat scruffy basement room at Summerhall, we see a table with nine or ten chairs around three sides. On the other side, a young man stands stirring a batter mix. This is Sean, and he tells us that he is making fortune cookies, using the traditional recipe of flour, water, egg, a pinch of salt, and a dash of sugar. He has substituted regular egg for a vegan egg mix, for the sake of inclusivity – which is what sharing food is all about. And no need for fancy additions like vanilla, he says. Simple is better. ‘I’m like a fortune cookie,’ he goes on to say – by which he means that he is neither Eastern nor Western, but a hybrid. Fortune cookies, we learn, had their origins in Japan, but their current form was invented in the USA, and initially marketed as Japanese cookies – until Pearl Harbour, which meant all things Japanese were to be avoided; so they were re-branded as a Chinese treat. 

When Sean’s maternal grandparents came to Scotland from Hong Kong, they (almost inevitably, as it is what immigrants so often do) opened a restaurant. Well, a Chinese take-away, anyway. Sean remembers a childhood spent perched on the counter, putting the fortune cookies in to the customers’ carry-out bags. They were in a big box, up high, and he never questioned where they came from, they were just always there, a mountain of little gold-foil-wrapped treasures. In fact, most of the world’s fortune cookies come via Wonton Food Inc in Brooklyn, who make millions daily. He also muses on his childhood memories of the differences between the food cooked in the take-away (chow mein and sweet-and-sour chicken balls) and the food they ate at home (steamed sea bass and congee rice porridge). 

Sean shares some of his interview research on fortune cookies. Apparently, some people don’t eat them, just pull them apart to get the fortune. In fact, some people don’t even realise you can eat them! This food wastage would have horrified Sean’s grandparents, who grew up during World War Two, when Japan occupied Hong Kong, and food was scarce…

Once the batter is mixed, it is poured into little cookie cases and cooked – not too much, as it needs to be pliable. In the meantime, we are invited to write our own fortune cookie messages, for ourselves or for others. Sean passes on his grandfather’s comment that the fortunes shouldn’t just be bland pleasantries, but have a bit of bite to them. Mine says ‘Whatever is happening, it will pass’. We are each given a metal cookie case with its little oval of lightly cooked dough, and we try to follow Sean’s example, enclosing the folded slip of paper into a kind of heart-shaped chamber. Et voila, fortune cookies.

Thirty minutes has gone by in a flash, and it is only as we leave that I realise how much has been shared and reflected on: What it is to be neither one thing nor another, always the outsider, your heritage often not seen or understood; how language can unite or divide, and how being bilingual often means being not quite there with either language; how hard immigrants work to establish themselves within a community, using food as a bridge to acceptance. At the start, Sean is a little actorly in his delivery, but as the show progresses, he relaxes into his role as storyteller and cook, watched over by a photo of his dearly departed Chinese grandparents. A History of Fortune Cookies is a tasty little treat – a poignant reflection on the human desire to fit in, to belong.

Exploring much of the same territory – migration, the need to belong, using food to provide comfort in hard times and to bridge the gap between people – comes our main course: My English Persian Kitchen, seen at The Traverse. The play, written by Hannah Khalil and directed by Chris White, is based on the true-life story of best-selling cookery book author Atoosa Sepehr.

Once again, as we enter the space, food is being prepared. Performer Isabella Nefar is set up behind a pretty swanky food station, chopping a mix of herbs: mint, spinach, chives, parsley and dill. Meanwhile, onions are frying in oil. The lights dim, and she addresses us directly, breaking the fourth wall from the start: ‘Can you smell those onions? Good, yes?’ Onions make you cry; you can’t help but cry, she says, and there’s an ironic note in her voice… 

She is making Ash-E-Reshteh – Persian noodle soup. You get it everywhere in Iran, we learn, as our unnamed narrator tells us tales of her teenage years standing on street corners with friends, chatting over take-out bowls of soup. We also learn that women like our narrator – highly educated, modern Iranian girls – don’t learn to cook as they don’t want to be tied to the kitchen stove like their mothers. 85% of Iranian women are educated to university level: ‘Of course we don’t cook. We work. We are professionals. As successful as the men.’

Over the next hour we witness a masterclass in storytelling – a recipe that blends the verbal, the physical and the visual with the additional sensory delights of smell and taste. A potent mix, served up with aplomb. Cooking might require a linear trajectory, but stories don’t necessarily work that way – memories and associations freely jump around in this tale of oppression, escape, liberation, and forging a new identity through food-making. We move from present to distant past to recent past, and back to the present. The overhead lamp, the cooking knives, and the fridge at the back of the space are used brilliantly as props to the storytelling, as our narrator embodies the memories that are surfacing. At first there are small hints, then fuller details follow. As the hour progresses, disparate images and expressed thoughts link up. A childhood incident of falling in to a swimming pool as a toddler – ‘can’t breathe… going under’ – ties into an account of our heroine’s abusive husband strangling her; and then to the moment where, stepping up to show her passport before boarding the plane that will take her to freedom, she tightens her headscarf so as not to attract attention for immodest appearance. Once again her breathe is held for a horribly long time, the sensation of choking overwhelming. Once on the plane, the scarf is discarded, then deliberately left behind on her seat as she disembarks and jumps into a taxi speeding away to a new life. A life that is painfully lonely for a long time, but eventually it is food that forms the bridge to community. She may have eschewed cooking as a young women, but now she loves it, and loves sharing her Persian meals with her neighbours. 

The soup is smelling good, and she’s made the toppings, too –  kasbk and saffron water and mint oil and fried garlic. She cheats a bit on the kasbk, using alternative ingredients that she can get in the UK, but she feels that’s OK. Would we like a taste? Most definitely! We crowd around. ‘This is better than yesterday, where we had an English queue,’ says our narrator, or perhaps by now she has become herself, Isabella – and we laugh as she dishes out the bowls of Ash-E-Reshteh. Such a delightful show – so carefully constructed, so beautifully performed. A feast for the soul.

For afters we have Ugly Bucket’s Stuffed. Not a show about food, we are told – a show about food banks. A show about ‘the bad stuff’. It’s a take-no-prisoners show that uses rebel clowning to brilliant effect: political theatre of the best sort – loud, abrasive, feisty, funny. And hard-hitting – literally, as the five performers stomp and bang and shout and punch the air in synchronised bursts of frenzied deviant disco routines, with the electronic music-making and physical performance merging seamlessly. The set is made up of industrial shelving, tables, and food crates; with projections of key phrases onto a curtain dividing up the performance space, and screens above providing captioning. 

Verbatim interviews with food bank workers are delivered by performers combining lip-synching and BSL signing to the original audio recording, to hammer home the shocking tales of true deprivation. A situation that is no accident, we are told, but deliberately engineered to keep a shell-shocked underclass cowering, denied any agency in their own lives.

This is all played out in a number of darkly funny scenes inspired by the recorded interviews, including one in which complete envisceration is responded to with the arrival of a team of band-aid bearing officials; and another that transposes the line ‘fighting over crumbs’ into a fabulous battle between squawking and pecking human birds. 

A scene that really hits home starts with the words ‘Why don’t they make soup?’ projected on to the curtain, the related audio interview playing out the reasons why whilst the performers lie inert on the floor. I’ll confess to having thought this myself: there have been times when I’ve been low on cash, and soup is so cheap and easy to make, right? Well yes, it is if (like me) you were brought up in a home where cooking from scratch was the norm. Easy if you know how, have stock and herbs and spices to-hand, have use of a cooker, have electricity, are able-bodied and mentally fit, well enough to make it to the shops, don’t get stressed by the crying children at your feet… We take so much for granted.

After witnessing the two earlier shows celebrating the making and sharing of food, it is sobering to be reminded that this is not everyone’s life experience. But it should be, and if you want to help to make that happen, Ugly Bucket have those crates for food bank donations, and a leaflet they give out full of suggestions – with a couple of free tea bags thrown in. Make a cuppa for yourself and share one, they suggest. You can’t change the whole world, but start with yourself and the person in front of you, then the people two doors down. Little by little, we can change things. Yes, we can.

Featured image (top) Sean Wai Keung: A History of Fortune Cookies

Sean Wai Keung: A History of Fortune Cookies runs twice-daily 1-16 August 2024 at Summerhall, 12:15 and 12:50. See www.summerhall.co.uk  

Soho Theatre & Traverse Theatre: My English Persian Kitchen plays at Traverse Theatre, 1 Aug – 25 Aug 2024 (not 5,12,19) various times. See: https://www.traverse.co.uk/whats-on/event/my-english-persian-kitchen-festival-24 

It will then transfer to Soho Theatre London, running 16 Sep-5 Oct 2024.

Ugly Bucket: Stuffed is at Pleasance Courtyard, 31 July to 26 August 2024, at 14:25.  See www.pleasance.co.uk