CAKE: Sarah Woods
Birmingham/Tour
CAKE
by Sara Woods
Jade theatre company on tour
Birmingham Repertory Theatre (Door studio) To 4 October 2003
Mon-Sat 7.45pm
Tour details: www.jadetc.co.uk/ 020 8340 3088
Runs: 1hr 15min
TICKETS: 0121 236 4455 (Birmingham)
Review: Kim Durham: 27 September 2003
Funny and quirkily profound take on the drama of young motherhood. A gem.One of television's early inventions was arrived at by Harry Corbett, through combining puppetry and slapstick to create the Sooty Show. Each week the hapless Harry would be subverted by his anarchic glove puppets, Sooty and Sweep. Frequently he ended up being pelted with eggs and flour. Much the same fate befalls Victoria Worsley in Cake.
What starts out as a cake-making demonstration, delivered with cool control and presentational authority, gradually descends into chaos as first spoons, and then a doll, pitch in to help.
Writer Sarah Woods, in conjunction with Jade, has created a wonderful extended metaphor for the tribulations of the young mother struggling to cope with toddlers. This is pretty much virgin territory for the theatre. Not easy to theatricalise - yet, as Woods shows, an area that is full of dramatic conflict and deep unresolved tensions, as well as great comic potential.
Animators Steve Tiplady and Rebekah Wild are masters of puppetry minimalism. Remaining fully visible throughout, they bring life to the inanimate by the simplest of means a wooden spoon is brought to life by a mere tilt of its head.
They seem to be at the terrible twos stage, do the spoons. Into everything, infinitely curious, querulous and messy. As Worsley's composure slips, her smile becomes more determined, even when, in a moment of Kleinian surrealism, they lay siege to her breasts.
The spoons are pre-verbal. Not so their elder sibling. He is into words, specifically understanding what precisely they mean - words like Love and Life. Big brother John, voiced by Tiplady, is a remarkable invention, a funny and oddly profound take on the drama of the child, as he gains the tragic awareness that he is not the sole focus of his mother's adoration.
As well as occasional murderous rages, this leads him into deep philosophising. What Tom Stoppard did for Hamlet in Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Woods does here for the cookery demonstration.
The whole is held together by Emma Bernard's tight direction and Worsley's performance, charting a course of rising panic, while baking and icing a cake pretty much in real time. Delia Peel (there had to be a Delia in there somewhere) has designed an elegantly functional set, all wipe down surfaces and built in cupboards and draws, and all used to great effect.
Mum: Victoria Worsley
John and Animations: Steve Tiplady
Animations: Rebekah Wild
Director: Emma Bernard
Designer: Delia Peel
Composer: Nigel Piper
Lighting Designer: Charles Balfour
2003-09-28 21:01:15