Food, the Edinburgh show cooking up thought-provoking comedy

Never work with children or animals, the old showbiz adage has it. But what about food? Walk on to a stage holding a melting ice cream or a plate of spaghetti and you can forget that climactic speech — it will never compete with the treacherous potential of your prop. And the aroma of a pan of frying onions can upstage even the greatest actor.

Undaunted, the American actor and theatre artist Geoff Sobelle is bringing a show to this year’s Edinburgh Festival dedicated entirely to this slippery adversary. Called, naturally enough, Food, it begins by seating the audience around a mammoth dining table, where Sobelle, kitted out like a waiter in one of the haughtier establishments, bustles about pouring wine.

“It’s sort of a fine-dining atmosphere,” he explains, speaking on Zoom. “There’s something about the relationship between fine dining and the theatre . . . ”

Publicity images for the show depict him messily festooned with spaghetti in a manner that would raise eyebrows in such an upmarket eaterie. But the piece combines physical comedy with food for thought.

“It’s a provocation for an audience to contemplate their own history of eating, preparing, growing and wondering about food,” Sobelle says. “I’m drawn to these very simple but very large themes. There’s something really absurd in just trying to make something called Food. I love that as a jumping-off point.”

Food follows Home and The Object Lesson, two similarly innovative works that expanded on the everyday to embrace profound questions about life. For The Object Lesson, which debuted in 2013, audiences sat in a vast room surrounded by cardboard boxes and mountains of old stuff, out of which Sobelle conjured a show about things — what we accumulate, what we value, why it matters. In Home, which began life four years later, he built a two-storey house in lightning-quick time on stage, then populated it with the multiple residents who might have lived there. Everyone inhabited the space simultaneously in a kind of time-travelling house party.

All three works focus on something basic to our lives — what we own, where we live, what we eat — then expand out from the specific to the general, from the personal to the political. A show about home can bring up poignant memories, but likewise embrace housing shortages or migration. A piece about food can be intensely personal yet also touch on the cost of living, globalisation and food shortage.

“There’s definitely a macro-micro element,” says Sobelle. “And, hopefully, instead of a feeling of ‘Got it, we’ve solved food,’ it’s more a sense of ‘Let’s just swim around and admit that we’ll never get it.’ And it’s OK to be overwhelmed.”

As he talks, a small child runs into the room behind him and hides behind a chair; it looks like a moment from one of his shows.

Sobelle’s work is marked by his keen sense of the absurd and of the rich stories to be found in everyday objects. He tells me a remarkable tale about his wife’s French grandfather, who kept bees during the war and would secretly transport arms to French Resistance fighters by hiding them in a wooden cart beneath the bees.

“If he was stopped, he would hit a rock or jostle the cart and the bees would freak out. So the soldiers would shout ‘Just go, go, go!’ They wouldn’t mess with him because of the bees. It’s amazing. If you keep digging, there are all these stories.”

Sobelle trained at the renowned Lecoq school in Paris and his work combines philosophical reflection with illusion and comedy. Laughter, he says, can “allow an audience to open”. He cites among his influences Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati, both of whom could spin blissful comic business out of almost anything. That wry take on everyday life appeals to Sobelle: “It’s how I see the world.”

There’s certainly a lot of comic potential in food. Think of the blue soup in the film Bridget Jones’s Diary, where our heroine uses blue gardening twine in her recipe with disastrous results, or the dinner scene in Richard Bean’s farce One Man, Two Guvnors, which follows a character’s chaotic efforts to serve the same meal to two people at once. On stage, a custard pie in the face is still one of the trustiest slapstick moments out there. The French company Nada Théâtre even once staged a production of UBU for two actors and a company of vegetables — leeks, peppers, cucumbers, cabbages — most of which were horribly sliced and diced by Alfred Jarry’s power-crazed couple.

Food can also anchor a show in the present moment. If someone on stage is grilling bacon, there can be no doubt that you’re in the same room with them. In David Hare’s 1995 play Skylight, one character cooked an entire spaghetti bolognese live on stage every night. Joe Penhall’s Some Voices (1994) ended with one brother teaching another how to make an omelette as an act of reconciliation and compassion. That humanity and potent use of meal as metaphor can also extend to the audience. In his 2022 solo show (le) PAIN, French artist Jean-Daniel Broussé baked baguettes, sharing them with the audience at the end.

Audience involvement is key to Sobelle’s Food, too. He encourages audiences to think about significant meals they have made — for friends, lovers, relatives. Previous performances have yielded moving responses. Sobelle recalls one man talking the audience through the steps of making a particular meal. “He cared for his grandmother as she was dying, and this meal was the last thing he made for her. It’s the most basic ritual of giving and receiving.”

That sense of ritual is baked into the very design of the piece, with its white tablecloth, wine glasses and cutlery. The word “companion” originally meant someone with whom we share bread.

“Even if there are just two of you around a table and you’re breaking bread, you are participating in a kind of ancient ritual,” says Sobelle. “So the show becomes the container that you, the audience, can fill with your ritual, whether it’s Shabbat or Christmas dinner, or whatever it is.”

‘Food’ runs at The Studio, Edinburgh, August 3-27, eif.co.uk, then at ASU Gammage, Arizona, October 21-23, and BAM Next Wave, New York, November 2-18, geoffsobelle.com