‘Food is a gift. Something you give to others. A privilege. An excuse to be with the ones you love’.
London-based Peruvian writer/performer Pepa Duarte writes, produces and stars in her debut play Eating Myself, directed by Sergio Maggiolo. She kicks off her UK tour in Brixton House before moving on to the likes of Bristol’s The Wardrobe Theatre, Newcastle’s Northern Stage and Cumbria’s Theatre by the Lake. If there was ever an excuse for a road trip, it’s catching this warm, exquisite play that tingles and fizzes with flavour.
Pepa’s multi-disciplinary working process begins from the performance space and often explores themes of identity, migration, feminism and belonging, in this instance through the lens of her relationships surrounding food. The stage is adorned with artfully suspended noodles, tea towels, utensils, bulbs of garlic, ears of corn, and pots and pans, all trussed up above a domestic cook’s mise-en-place: a table set with stock cubes, sunflower oil, salt, colourful plastic bowls, and a clay pot over a tiny gas stove. Throughout the 60 minute production, Pepa cooks a traditional Peruvian soup for her audience in real time, inviting us to share the tastes and rituals that make up the story of herself. Far from a gimmick, this feels like a wondrous gift. She adds ingredients to the soup and stirs at perfectly timed intervals, transitioning from one chapter, mood or voice to another by means of this familiar, repetitive process. The synchronicity with which she weaves together both art forms, and the soft billows of aromatic steam rising gently from the pot as the play’s constant, are magic.
The most delicious fourth wall break ensues for the production’s finale. The soup is real, Pepa tells us, to laughter, and you are invited to taste it. We line up tentatively, gladly, for our small bowls, and find ourselves sitting around the intimate theatre afterwards, talking, eulogising, sharing a meal with strangers. It is this carefully curated togetherness, which nonetheless has all the joy of spontaneity, a happy accident, that rounds off her narrative arc so spectacularly. Pepa dedicates a good deal of stage time to unpicking the painful, restrictive relationship with food she experienced throughout her adulthood. Being around other people was disastrous for her diets: all that criticising, commenting, worrying and not to mention tempting (some rice won’t kill you. Won’t you try this? Go on, it’s a Sunday. You can’t be on a diet forever) meant that she preferred to eat, and be, alone. There were practical considerations too: she rarely made plans after 2pm because that would mean carrying around three plastic containers filled with precisely measured, perfectly balanced, tasteless meals. She enacts this in a surreal register, depicting a maniacal protectiveness over her rituals of control – containers representing her mornings, half mornings, dinners, quantifying her consumption and shutting out her life with the snap of a lid.
Pepa navigates her themes with impeccable comedic timing, charisma and warmth: it’s impossible to draw your eyes away from her. She speaks of her kitchen-based conspiratorial alliance with her Grandma as a child, secretly adding stock cubes to the soup, and then waiting gleefully for her mother to taste it and smile and announce in vindication: see, there was no need for additional flavourings. She hails the mouth-watering flavours of her home country, and the delicious comfort food that characterises Peruvian cuisine – ‘it’s cold in Peru, that’s why they need all the calories’. Her grandfather walked from Machu Picchu to Lima, a journey that takes eight hours by bus, fuelled by such life-affirming victuals as Papas Rellenas, breadcrumb-coated, deep fried ground beef, cheese and rice-filled mashed potato balls. She struggles to reconcile desires surrounding her self-image and the conflicting parts of her identity, influenced by British beauty standards to arrive at the conclusion she will never be thin and Peruvian. She was young when her Grandma died, and thought it was a game, running downstairs to see how her cousin would take the news. She didn’t cry. She didn’t know she wouldn’t see her again, that she would disappear forever. Now, the soup is all she has left.
The play charts this movement from such an insular, isolated place, with Pepa starving herself of food and company, eating to survive but not to live, to a momentous common experience, her grandmother’s memory incarnated in the act of cooking her recipes, an act of shared joy and boundless, transformative love – the boundaries between audience and performer are broken down by her cooking, transforming us from strangers into loved ones eating soup around a table. The programme encourages audience members to take to social media and share their thoughts on the show with the hashtag #HowWastheSoup? Spoiler alert: the soup is very, very good.