Food, Spurious Food!
Time of My Life by Alan Ayckbourn
Derby Playhouse, 1996
Imagine you’re a theatre producer. The most famous playwright in the country has written this marvellous comedy set in a restaurant where much of the action centres around the sweet trolley. The only trouble is, he’s invented for the occasion a menu of ridiculously scrumptious-sounding dishes that have no equivalent in the real world. What do you do? Get on the phone to Scarborough? “Hello Alan, just finished reding your play Time of My Life, very funny, ha ha ha… er, just one tiny thing, what on earth are crimpledoos?”
No, what you do is you get your trusty stage management team to come up with something that will fit the bill. And crimpledoos haven’t been the half of it. In addition to having to conjure up a course that looks as good as that sounds, they have also been required to invent from scratch a dessert that might be a ‘chooker’ and something else that could conceivably answer to the name of ‘shups’.
(For the record, it has been decided that a crimpledoo is some kind of crinkle-cut pasta dish, chooker is a superior chocolate confection, and shups is a raspberry sponge pudding made with almonds.)
“It’s a design question as much as anything else,” explains deputy stage manager Simon Sinfield. “We’ve had to create a whole sweet trolley made up of food both real and fake. It’s got to be colourful and tasty-looking, but not exaggeratedly so, it’s not like a panto where it would just need to be big and colourful. Above all it’s got to be realistic and actually edible.”
There are many ways of creating a fake meal on stage. First of all, to make the portions look healthy without breaking the bank, you can bulk out the plates with painted plaster replicas of whatever it is, then add just a few spoonfuls of the real thing to top off the pile. In the recent Derby Playhouse production of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, for instance, the deep and inviting bowl of strawberries was 95% plastic fruits glued together with only a few real ones on top for the actors to eat. For Time of My Life this technique has been employed for the profiteroles, although before now Simon has made various puddings out of latex and that white sealant normally used to waterproof joints in the bathroom. “Latex is good because it’s cheap and practical. You can spray it or paint it to bulk out anything that’s to be seen but not eaten, especially puddings – sweets, blancmanges, meringues.”
Specialist fake food companies can supply anything more sophisticated if need be, but often stage management find the challenge quite exciting. When the alternative is paying a fiver for a plastic lobster, it’s worth having a go yourself. A thoroughly convincing smoked salmon, for instance, can be manufactured out of a beef tomato properly sliced and carefully arranged. Down the other end of the prandial scale, basic fry-ups can be concocted out of the most unlikely ingredients. “There’s a saying: if you can’t make it out of Smash mash and bananas then it’ not worth doing.”
A play which centres around food as Time of My Life does may seem an actor’s dream in that they won’t need to eat when they get home, but it isn’t always as straightforward as that. When a play has been cast the costume designer will need to know individual actors’ measurements and the marketing team will reuire a list of their previous appearances: one of the first questions stage management asks is “What are you allergic to?” In the case of the present play, one of the actresses can’t eat cream, chocolate, or anything out of a tin, so several dishes have had to be created with this in mind. Another of Simon’s productions, The Secret Life of Beatrix Potter, featured a roast which all the actors had to tuck into – including the sole vegetarian in the cast who each night had to make sure he carefully cut off the slice of meat that was made of soya.
Time of My Life is not the only Ayckbourn play which features a meal. Table Manners consists almost entirely of a series of dining room squabbles, and the second act of How the Other Half Loves ends with a hilariously convoluted dinner party scene. So good as the fare on offer when this play ran at Derby that when the curtain fell, the actors sat on through the interval until they had cleared their plates. And Simon recalls one production of Sleuth where from the stalls the caviare looked uncannily realistic. As a pro himself, Simon had worked out that it must be blackcurrant jam, only to discover later that what the actors had been shovelling down with every appearance of relish had in fact been – caviare! One wonders if the producers would have been quite so generous had the cast been any larger than it was…
So much for food, but what of drink? Copious quantities of fluid are always on hand to help keep the actors’ throats lubricated, and in addition they make sure they take only small mouthfuls from equally small plates. Alan Ayckbourn, a man of the theatre to his tastebuds, obviously bore this in mind when he was constructing the piece.
As for proper booze, this can often be difficult to get right on stage. There is a rumour that they have to use real beer in Coronation Street simply because they haven’t been able to come up with an adequately convincing alternative. But on stage a sugar solution for the local chemist can be used as a base for a whole drinks cabinet’s worth of liquid refreshments from liquor to tea. It also gives that vital cloudy texture which is so important for alcoholic drinks like red wine, port, brandy and whisky. Cochineal turns water into red wine, while for port you add a drop of blue food colouring for that essential ruby glow. Or, for a quick fix, you can use apple juice, but here it is vital that the actor remembers not to shake the bottle otherwise he’s end up with a most unconvincing head on his scotch.
As for champagne, the reason you will so often see Moët et Chandon listed in production credits is because, sensible to the discreet advertising that plays in performance can give them, they have produced a ginger ale packaged in authentic-looking champagne bottles of varying sizes which, when opened on stage, will look and react exactly like the best vintage wine for only a fraction of the price. The liquid will even float a fake goldfish if need be, as Simon Sinfield had the chance to find out when he worked on a production of the opera La Duenna. Unfortunately, when the cast enthusiastically threw up their glasses in a toast the air was suddenly filled with a blizzard of bits of orange peel.
Such disasters are only to be expected in a performance where the opportunity for messy spillage is so great. The advantage of having waiters available in a restaurant scene is obvious – they can make unobtrusive and perfectly plausible entrances with mop and bucket at any time, though even the waiters can’t do much about broken glass, which is why the large amount of real glass on stage this evening (plastic is too light) is handled with kid gloves.
Simon remembers one production he was involved in which required the use of vodka. The empty bottles supplied for the performance had held proper vodka at some stage, but try as he might Simon couldn’t completely shift the traces of its taste from their insides. What was odd, however, was that when the actors came to quaff from these bottles (now filled with water) in rehearsal, so convinced were they that they were consuming alcohol, they ended up rolling around drunk simply because they thought they had been drinking the real thing. The director was puzzled – and no doubt so were the actors when they sobered up.
But this is still not a patch on the story of the Victorian actress who literally committed suicide on stage by deliberately knocking back a poisoned posset. What extremes of passion drove her to such an act can only be imagined, but presumably they were similar to those which drove another actor, got up in a suit of armour, to plunge into a water tub in full view of the audience and despatch himself that way. There’s no doubt about it, liquid and actors don’t always mix.
The one part of his job that Simon really doesn’t relish is the washing up afterwards. (He says he has put in a request for a dishwasher which he fully expects to be met with a hollow laugh.) Fake food or not, the crockery and the cutlery and the tablecloths and the napkins still need to be cleaned. “It’s like clearing up after a party – do you do it that night or leave it till next morning? It’s still got to be done. And we all try to get out of it.”
Just like real life, in fact…
PS
Chuffed with that title. I’ve always believed that when writing, if you can come up with a good title and a good last line, you’re halfway there. The title gives you a theme, a tone, and a starting point, and the last line shows you where you mean to end up.
The bit about getting a head on your scotch came from experience. In Simon Gray’s Close of Play (Bristol, 1983) I was playing the alcoholic son Benedict who only ever stopped speaking in order to knock back yet another tumblerful. One night I decided to stretch myself and thought I’d do a bit of physical acting with the bottle, waving it in my father’s face or something. Just goes to show you should never introduce business into the show without having rehearsed it first. Suddenly I was standing there brandishing a Johnnie Walker bottle obviously half full of foaming apple juice.
I can no longer understand that bit about the goldfish and the orange peel. Is the opera La Duenna famous for its floating-a-goldfish-in-champagne aria? Can’t say I’m familiar.