Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh
Four stars
A row of giant vegetables are lined up like they’ve just won first prize in the local village fete as the audience enters this very special silver jubilee celebration of Magnetic North Theatre Company’s assorted off-kilter adventures over the last 25 years. The smiles on the vegetables skins give the gave away, however, as this rogues gallery of very fresh looking life size produce are actually characters in `Pass the Spoon, a ‘sort of opera’ first produced at Tramway in Glasgow back in 2011.
This TV cooking show set collaboration between composer David Fennessy, artist David Shrigley and Magnetic North director Nicholas Bone is introduced by our hosts, June Spoon and Phillip Fork, before an overripe banana and a depressed egg appear as they await gluttonous guest star Mr Granules. With the vegetables mere appetisers, the result resembles an absurdist Masterchef/It’s a Knockout mash up scripted by Alfred Jarry.
Thirteen years on, this film of a 2012 London performance is a glorious snapshot of a show that gorged on its own ridiculousness. The performances by the late Pauline Knowles as June Spoon and Stewart Cairns as Phillip Fork are sublime, with Martin McCormick’s Banana and Gavin Mitchell’s Mr Egg deliriously deadpan delights. Singer Peter Van Hulle makes for a magnificently psychotic butcher, while Tobias Wilson gives life to Mr Granules and the Vegetables. All this is driven by Fennessy’s loony tunes and not so merry melodies played by the eleven strong Red Note Ensemble.
Watching all this in on-screen close-up as performed in front of a live audience gives the production a whole extra dimension, as if one had woken up in a parallel universe in which programmes like Pass the Spoon are actual prime time staples.
There’s something going on here too about lowest common denominator light entertainment shows devouring themselves to death, but this notion probably shouldn’t be overegged too much. Either way, for its unrepentant daftness alone this film should appear on terrestrial schedules on permanent repeat.
The Herald, December 20th 2024
ends
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