EATING IT UP

PICTURES:

Geoff Sobelle is back with another slice of immersive theatrical illusion, this time tackling our relationship with food. He talks to Rory Doherty about turning his focus on an audience and the joy of losing control

Alot of things fascinate Geoff Sobelle. As he returns to Edinburgh International Festival with a new show, the theatremaker and illusionist (aren’t they the same thing?) has set his sights on food, with an immersive and absurdist piece that interrogates what we take for granted about what we eat. The show forms a loose trilogy with previous Edinburgh shows, The Object Room and HOME, even if the scale has been drastically altered. In 2018, HOME built a cross-sectioned house in front of the audience every night, filling it with the rituals and repeated motions that make a space lived-in. ‘I loved the size of that very, very much, and I hope to return to that,’ Sobelle says. ‘But my instinct was to come back to something small and intimate at a table.’

He has spent an enviable career making the unusual feel welcoming and the recognisable seem uncanny. FOOD gathers an audience around a large, restaurant-style table (‘people are funny. They’ll put their phone or their keys on the table. It’s not a restaurant, but it sure seems like one!’) with one of its four sides being Sobelle’s stage.

I ask if there’s a science to immersing an audience in a theatrical experience; he centres on the word ‘science’ a lot, referencing the unusual space he used for The Object Room at Summerhall in 2014.

‘There was no stage; there was no vantage point; in the beginning there was nothing to look at. You were kind of rooting through boxes, and it was like an installation,’ he explains. ‘So when stuff started to happen, you didn't really know where to look. People were scattered in a very haphazard way and pretty uncomfortable . . . all of that I found tremendously exciting, because you were kind of bonded with the other people in this awkwardness.’

These observations were crucial to FOOD’s staging. ‘It’s a little more comfortable seating-wise, but you’re in a funny proximity with one another. You might be sitting right next to somebody who you didn’t come with, but it’s like being at a dinner party; you’re like, “oh well, hi there”, and suddenly you’re next to them.’

It’s also true that despite a lot of dinner parties and restaurants being socially uncomfortable, isn’t there a pervading expectation that we should find them relaxing?

In response, Sobelle cites another example from his work. ‘When we did HOME, we made a house on stage. There’s a moment of a big party, and many audience members would find their way on stage, and people would gravitate toward the kitchen. Is it a kitchen? No, there’s just nothing usable in the kitchen, and yet it had all of the signs of a kitchen. That was enough for people to feel safe the way they do at parties, when they just come to the kitchen. We always laughed at that. We still go there even though there's no beer in the fridge.’

Audiences may baulk at the idea of attending a show where a spotlight is turned onto how they watch and react to the stage. For Sobelle, it’s part of the process of questioning relationships we thought we knew intimately. What’s more, he’s fascinated with illusions (which are created through constraints being imposed on what we see) and if the same applies to the cultivating, harvesting and preparing of food. He talks about ‘tableside guacamole’ from his native California, where four ingredients are brought out and turned into guac in front of the customer. ‘In my version of this, it would have been like, “I’m gonna bring all of the soil that it would take to make your stupid avocado, and then I’m going to bring all of the migrant labour that actually grew that avocado, and their families. And I’m going to bring all of the gas that it took . . . ” and so on.’

Of course, it depends on your perspective: as the cook in his family, Sobelle feels no wonder towards cooking’s many miracles. He finds it laborious and mundane. But getting down and dirty with all the minerals and creatures that make things grow in the garden, which he started with his wife and two young children during the pandemic, has been eye-opening.

‘That kind of elemental, visceral thing is the antithesis of the neat box of the theatre, and certainly of magic and illusion. In an illusion, you need the 90-degree angles, the box tricks; it’s about really trying to control vantage points. With gardening, and even cooking and certainly feeding toddlers, the last thing you are in is control. That’s exciting to me.’

It’s clear even the simplest (but of course, not that simple) food concepts ignite something in Sobelle’s mind. ‘There’s something funny about an illusion of growing, the idea that you put a seed in and grow a potato, like it happens that fast. It’s sort of a delicious joke. You also recognise that a lot of people are excised from this equation. But in a restaurant, there is an illusion; the seed is, “I’ll have the steak tartare”, and, ding ding, here is the product.’ With FOOD, it seems Geoff Sobelle has crafted a way to serve his many fascinations to the world.

FOOD, The Studio, 3–26 August, 8pm; 12, 19, 26 & 27 August, 2pm.

BASED ON THE FILM DOGVILLE BY LARS VON TRIER, FROM AWARD-WINNING DIRECTOR

CHRISTIANE JATAHY