In a Leith rehearsal room, the cast of
Grid Iron Theatre Company's production of The Devil's Larder, which
begins a short tour of some of Scotland's more less travelled venues
next week, are pondering the contents of a label-free tin of
something that's presumably edible.
“Do you know what it is?” asks
Johnny Austin.
“I don't want to know,” Charlene
Boyd snaps back.
“It feels quite syrupy,” Ashley
Smith ponders as she shakes the tin.
“I know what it is,” says Antony
Strachan.
No-one asks, with Austin and Boyd
slipping into character as they proffer the tin up like gothic quiz
show hosts that could have been made flesh and blood from an Edward
Gorey drawing as they salivate and speculate over the tin's
potentially aphrodisiac contents with thrustingly lascivious intent.
So erotic is Austin and Boyd’s routine that director Ben Harrison
gets them to pare things down so that only the faintest whiff of sex
remains.
“Maybe if you stopped touching each
other,” he says.
The Devil's Larder is a compendium of
fourteen bite-size short stories taken from Jim Crace's novella of
the same name and adapted for the stage by Harrison. The show was
first produced by Grid Iron a decade back after being commissioned by
Cork 2005 European Capital of Culture prior to an Edinburgh Festival
Fringe run at Debenhams department store on Princes Street.
For this tenth anniversary revival, The
Devil's Larder will open at Custom's House, the Leith-based building
used as a store room for the last thirty years, but which is now in
the care of the Scottish Historic Buildings Trust. Grid Iron will
then tour the show to venues in Selkirk, Oban and Melvich.
“It was one of the company's
favourite shows,” says Harrison about revisiting The Devil's
Larder, “and it didn't have a huge run in Scotland. That was one
reason for taking another look at it. The other was approaching The
Touring Consortium to find out what audiences in places like Oban
might want to see. The answers that came back were something about
family, something about community, something that was funny and
something that was moving. We thought, hmm, I think we've got
something that has all of that.”
Harrison was first attracted to The
Devil's Larder, which was first published in 2001, by its cover.
“It was a very striking image of a
woman with a mouthful of blackberries,” he recalls, “and the
juice dribbling down her mouth looks like blood.”
With Grid Iron having already explored
the erotics of food with their 1998 show, Gargantua, it seemed a good
companion piece. For Crace, who describes The Devil's Larder as a
cumulative novel made up of sixty-four parts, it gave his book a
fresh lease of life.
“As a book it's a favourite of mine,”
he says, “because it enabled me to be playful. Normally my books
are serious, but when it came out it did#'t initially get that much
exposure. Now it's ended up onstage, it's been given a different kind
of exposure, so maybe it was always meant to be onstage.
“Both writing and reading are very
solitary acts, and I've often found that difficult as a writer,
because I like to be sociable. Theatre, on the other hand, isn't a
solitary activity. It's a social activity, with colleagues and
comrades all working together. What was great about seeing Grid
Iron's version of it ten years ago, and I'm sure will be again, is
that they take it off the page, with real faces and real voices
responding to each other and really fleshing it out, so the book's
now been socialised.”
With this in mind, Crace admits that it
might have made more sense for him to adapt The Devil's Larder for
the stage himself. The fact that his daughter, Lauren Crace, is an
actress and writer who was a regular in East Enders prior to focusing
on theatre encouraged him even more. As he also admits, however, “I
don't have the skills to do it. When I nominally retired from
fiction writing, one of the things I wanted to do was write plays,
but I sat down to try and write one again and again, and each time I
did that I don't think I got beyond the first half page.”
Whatever Crace's own limitations,
theatre has continued to embrace his work. As well as The Devil's
Larder, also touring this month is a stage version of his historical
novel, The Gift of Stones, in a production by the Richmond-based
North Country Theatre. Also set to be produced is a version of his
Man Booker short-listed 2013 novel, Harvest, by Birmingham Rep.
In the meantime, Harrison's new
production of The Devil's Larder is, on the showing of this week's
rehearsals, at least, already looking like a darker and more stylised
production than Grid Iron's first take on it.
“We're older and have more life
experience second time around,” is how Harrison sees it, “so
hopefully we can bring more layers to it.”
Other things have changed too in the
last decade that may give the show a new resonance. On a superficial
level, where before Grid Iron might have been hard-pressed to find a
café selling fancy coffee in their adopted neighbourhood, today
there are three Michelin-starred restaurants within a stone's throw
of Customs House. One story, too, Angel Dough, now can't help but
remind audiences of food-obsessed TV shows such as The Great British
Bake-Off.
On a more serious note, given the
recent flight of Syrians from their homeland, the fact that two of
the fourteen stories, A Little Town of Great Charity and The Refugee
of the Seventh Floor, concern themselves with refugees is painfully
pertinent.
“That wasn't in our minds the first
time we did it,” says Harrison, “but now you can't help but think
about Syria.”
This tallies with Crace's observation
that “It's not actually about food at all. If you kept the book in
the kitchen and tried to follow the recipes in it you'd end up
poisoning yourself. Each section is about something else entirely.”
Whatever The Devil's Larder is about,
seeing it receive a second stage life is something Crace is clearly
thrilled about.
“When you write a book,” he says,
“that's pleasing in itself, but when it gets another life, that's
something else again. Three sections of The Devil's Larder have been
filmed, and just this week I got a letter from a composer wanting to
set a song I wrote for one of them a capella. All of this after life
is something I count myself really lucky about. It puts a spring in
my step.”
As for Grid Iron, Crace is gushing with
praise for their efforts.
“They're so courageous,” he says.
“There's nothing in their productions they can't do. Grid Iron
should be cherished.”
The Devil's Larder, Customs House,
Edinburgh as part of the Traverse Theatre programme, October 18-24;
The Haining, Selkirk, October 29-31; Rockfield Centre, Oban, November
6-7; Melvich Hotel, Melvich, November 13-15.
www.griditron.org.uk
The Herald, October 16th 2015
ends
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