A year ago Peter Hayes got together with Gaetan Schmidt to see whether food could translate into theatre
Guy Willoughby
Peter Hayes, whose seriously yummy two- hander Play with Your Food opened at Johannesburg’s Civic Theatre this week, picks through a piled-up plate of sweet potato, eggplant and avocado in our seriously cool Cape Town restaurant. A waitron-in-black hovers, awaiting the verdict: ”Divine”, smiles the gourmet- actor. ”I’m finished.”
Actually, he’s only begun. For the next hour, an expansive Hayes regales me with the cheerily good-news story of how Play with Your Food – a delightfully witty, wacky theatrical concoction that’s already cooked up a storm in Cape Town – first took shape a year ago, ”in his ”dreadful tiny little kitchen” with co- actor Gaetan Schmidt.
”I wanted to combine my passion for food and theatre, to prepare food on stage, share both recipes and dishes with the audiences, and see if cooking translates in performance. Schmidt said, ‘You don’t drink. Audiences like a cook who drinks. I’ll drink, you stand there, pour me shots and chop vegetables.’ We started playing around, gagging, improvising, focussing on food that is visual and that people perceive as very difficult.”
The difficulty of the dishes is half the fun: ”We wanted to dare audiences, to make them think, ‘I could never do that!’ Like baked Alaska. Would you even try it at home, never mind on stage? All that cream and whipped egg yolk … Well, we do it, and give the audiences the results to eat. They come away thinking, ‘I can do it!’ It’s empowering. And they get the recipes thrown in with the programme too!”
Play with Your Food – ”Our printers nearly changed that to Eat with Your Food!” – first simmered in Hayes’s mind during the run-up to Cape Town’s Gourmet Festival, the sumptious foodie fest that took place last May. ”I pursuaded them to take us on. We were a satellite attraction, an event in a demonstration kitchen rather than a theatre.
”The organisers were very nervous. They thought that, being actors, we’d be rather disrespectful of food. They asked us, ‘Do you throw it at the audience?”’
Having brought a battery of big catering sponsors to the table, Hayes and Schmidt took the show next to the Standard Bank National Arts Festival in Grahamstown last July, where they were ”overwhelmed” by the response. ”I’ve been fascinated by the show’s broad appeal.
”We get ’em all: 15-year-olds who think the poster’s cool, little old ladies who say, ‘Tell us that recipe again?’ Rugger- buggers buy the show for birthday parties. Media trendies sit and drool, they can’t believe we actually cook what we do.”
Hayes gives a satisified lip-smack after a choice sliver of avocado: ”There’s something about the essential nature of food everybody responds to. We all like to eat – and to eat well!”
Now, Play with Your Food has just completed a triumphant run at Cape Town’s Nico Theatre. Somehow, the spectacle of two lively actors chatting, preparing, and ultimately celebrating food on stage has sorely tickled the public palate. Hayes, who trained as a caterer in London after leaving University of Cape Town’s drama school in 1986, is delighted.
”We’re using the totally sensory power of theatre – the audience gets to taste, touch, smell, see and hear. You get sedate audiences, and greedy audiences! – There’s lots of participation, so people get familiar with us very quickly. They chat among themelves, read the recipes, offer suggestions …This is why I am in the theatre – to push boundaries.”
Generically, Hayes, Schmidt and director Anton Burggraaf rework a tried-and-tested formula. ”It’s the traditional two-clown relationship – I’m the intellectual, verbal clown, he’s [Schmidt] the buffoon. Improvisation comes easier to me. We play up the fact that Gaetan’s a Spaniard – he speaks no English in the show, he communicates physically. There’s something about two men cooking and evidently enjoying themselves that intrigues people too.”
Play with Your Food is the latest in a string of innovative stage successes that the mercurial Hayes – actor, director, writer, producer – has fostered since the early Nineties. As director of the Hearts and Eyes Collective, a floating pool of stage practicioners, Hayes has made good, cutting-edge theatre with a crisp contemporary spin – and this at a time when many have wrung their hands at the future of theatre. The key is, of course, money, and Hayes has proved quite good at accessing it.
”Unless it’s run as a business, there is no future for theatre. I think I have learned from hard experience how to approach potential sponsors, to say to them, ‘Do you know what this show can do for your company?’ I make sure I talk to the right people, and aks for a decent sum of money. We aks for too little to begin with!”
Hayes’s directorial credits include Oedipus Sex, World of Words and the ambitious, uneven Journey (1996) – ”that production still needs another chance” – and, as an actor, he grabbed national headlines in 1994/95 with Get Hard. That seering one-man tour through a gay man’s sexuality was a sensation wherever it played: ”As a performer, it was an incredible gift.”
The Hearts and Eyes Collective have another special boon for Gauteng theatre- goers right now – one not a million miles away from Get Hard. Eve Ensor’s The Vagina Monologues (see review on page 20), featuring a truly coruscating performance from Lara Bye, opened at the Wits Amphitheatre last week after a packed Cape run.
”I’ve admired Eve’s plays for a long time, and in New York I came across The Monologues and thought, ‘This is for [director] Nichole Levin.’ It’s the distilled testimony of scores of women talking about the unspoken – how they feel about their vaginas. I am thrilled with how Lara and Nichole have turned it into wonderful local theatre.”
Lara Bye narrates a funny, bitter-sweet journey through a varied series of female characters, and the result is a triumph of playing which in Cape Town pulled every sort of woman into the Gauloises Warehouse Theatre: ”It’s been liberating for women and a lot of men, too. You realise that not talking about vaginas, perpetuating mystery, fear, and ultimately violence, is a lot more dangerous than talking about it.”
Once again, The Vagina Monologues has brought audiences into the theatre for a play that is popular because it tackles the now. ”This kind of show bridges the gap between the mainstream and alternative theatre, which is why we chose Wits for Johannesburg. There is space for dialogue between actors and audiences there.”
What does the future hold for the Hearts and Eyes? ”Gaetan and I plan a Play with Your Food Part 2 for Grahamstown this year. After eight years as my own producer, marketer and funding specialist, I need a business partner. The kind of work I’m creating involves a great deal of business propositions, and while I’ve got quite good at it I need to concentrate on the work.”
Hayes gives a final flourish over the now emptied vegetable platter. ”I’m tired of negativity. Sure, you have to work hard to win funding. But if you see our work here in a world context, you realise we have outstanding practicioners in this country. Also, our young people are actually in the theatre far more than we realise. You ask Americans about the average age of their audience-members!”
Play with Your Food is showing at the Tesson Theatre in the Civic Theatre complex in Braamfontein until April 9. Tel (011) 403-3408