In a time of scarcity, what responsibility does theatre have to feed or nourish its audience? Writer and performer Sam Rees reflects on The Food Bank Show.
For over a year now, I’ve been researching and making The Food Bank Show, a new piece of documentary theatre about food poverty in the UK. This Autumn, I’ll be debuting the piece at CPT as part of ‘The State We’re In 2024’. Over this long
period of creation, my mind turned repeatedly to the idea of spaces and places as sites of contestation. The food banks I visited were most often converted or repurposed buildings, like libraries, schools or churches, tucked-away places where organisations were making do. Again and again, this emphasised to me how cramped and precarious our world actually is. The show is built from conversations with a variety of people: food bank beneficiaries, volunteers, MPs, activists. All of them had different life experiences and perspectives, but one thing that came up again and again in these conversations was the idea of scarcity: scarcity of time, of resources, of space. That’s what I saw everywhere: scarcity and hunger, sitting side-by-side, a pinched, ungenerous world.
So, when building a piece of theatre, an event which means a group of people sharing a space together, how can we think about scarcity and hunger? I began to realise that I couldn’t create this piece in a vacuum; this wouldn’t be the type of theatre that exists in a quarantine bubble for an hour with no relationship to its surroundings. I had to think about space and place, and what gathering people together actually means. To that end, The Food Bank Show begins in the foyer before the performance, where free pizza is offered to the audience. This is a way to level the playing field, to ensure that we are all starting this experience with our bellies full. It’s also a way of exploring how a theatrical encounter can nourish its audience, an audience who are giving their precious time and even-more-precious money. It’s an attempt to say: thank you for being here, we’ll try to look after you.
Throughout the course of the show, I play a quiz with the audience (get an answer right, you win a donut), the lights are all kept on, I speak to them as if they’re really in front of me. We acknowledge our shared presence in this place together. I’m always trying to discuss these heavy topics of hunger and poverty and capitalism in a way that doesn’t hypothesise them, doesn’t let us forget our connection to everything outside of the room we’re sitting in, that positions us not just as theatregoers, but as citizens.
Beyond the specific performance setting, we’re also collaborating with CPT to explore how theatre buildings can be used to deliver tangible support to their communities. We are working with Euston Food Bank (a few minutes’ walk from the theatre), setting up a donation point at CPT in the lead-up to and during the show’s run, where visitors to the venue can leave items that we will transport to
the food bank. I want to think more deeply about how theatre buildings can act as community hubs, and start to develop strategies for taking action. I’m really grateful that CPT are so up for this initiative, it’s another affirmation for me that this show is at the right theatre.
Making theatre in a hungry world is an intimidating thing to do; I so often feel like it’s a fraught, desperate process, where you’re frantically trying to hold on to things as they constantly threaten to fall apart in your hands. Everywhere, there’s scarcity. But one thing theatre can do better than anything else is build collective spaces for people. And if as an industry we take that capacity seriously, we could change what theatre buildings mean. They could stop feeling so rarefied, and instead feel more like hubs, and we could bridge the gap between art and the ‘real world’. And maybe that’s a useful starting point: for theatre to exist in a hungry world it needs to feed people. The Food Bank Show started with conversations in spaces, and the end-product is also a conversation in a space. It’s an attempt at, as one interviewee put it to me, ‘having a meeting on a level footing’. I’m tremendously excited to have that meeting with the audience, to share a space for an hour, and to consider together how we might create a more nourishing world.
Thurs 31 Oct - Sat 2 Nov 2024 at 9pm
Tickets £8 - £12
