A bold and wild imagination of the body
Written and performed by Chris Fung and directed by Rupert Hands, The Society of New Cuisine endeavours to tackle contemporary issues through elements of Buddhist-inspired folk fable. Following its first run at the Edinburgh Fringe, the London debut invites the audience to ponder desire, happiness, and what it means to practice self-denial in a physical, embodied way.
Fung’s script charts the personal story of a man’s romantic trajectory. From dating to the eventual fall of his marriage, he finds himself hauntingly lonely, as his wife Beth becomes increasingly consumed by work and emotionally absent. There is an interesting reversal of traditional gender power-dynamics here: while it’s often the wife who complains of an unavailable husband, Fung’s flip creeps into the legitimacy of his masculinity as an East Asian man.
Such “identity crisis”- a deeply ontological one – is intertwined with the recurring ghost of Cantonese filial piety, conveyed through a series of voicemails from his mother. Her voice, alternating between guilt-tripping and manipulative affection, pressures him to hand over his salary and return home. Fun fact: while this is not practised widely in the sinosphere, in ingrained Cantonese culture, giving your wages to your parents, and sometimes even your extended clan, is a filial piety duty, a repayment of the “investment” they made in raising you.
Almost crushed by this combined weight of emotional and filial pressure, the character discovers The Society of New Cuisine, a secret group that pays him in exchange for his blood, and later for other parts of his body. When his body is exploited, cut and even consumed (by himself), this surreal yet brutal process becomes actually “virtuous”: it is humbleness and self-denial in a physical way, an em-body-ment of Buddhist ideals of detachment and redemption, and a painful yet sharp warning against overt worldly (and vicious) joys such as money, promotion and sex.
While this is an interesting viewpoint to explore, the structure often feels too chopped, struggling to support Fung’s thematic ambition. Even with Rajiv Pattani’s nuanced lighting design, the transitions between vignettes still feel abrupt. The introduction of the group comes too late into the narrative, and it is very hard to grip its underlying logic: how the spirit behind the behaviour of self-harming and self-consuming, can be organically articulated with the play’s multiple narrative threads. It makes the play’s philosophical attempt more like a gesture rather than full realisation, diluted by its own narrative sprawl.
Despite its narrative disjunctions, the play’s sheer physical intensity is impressive. The production leans heavily into a kind of rawness with untamed energy that almost feels contrast with the existential philosophy of Buddhism, and Fung literally pours himself into the performance, constantly in motion across Yimei Zhao’s beautifully designed traverse stage. festooned with cameras, cables, and microphone stands, the stage evokes a blend of clinical exposure and techno-ritual, scattered with multiple cables, wires, mounting cameras and microphone stands, easily reminding you the storehouse dance scene in Disco Elysium.
Strangely though, such physical intensity doesn’t really awe me or overwhelm me. Instead, I remain distant and irrelevant. Part of this stems from the fact that, although it’s a one-hander, Fung rarely engages directly with the audience. The physical intensity, while persistent, can feel forced: more a product of directorial instruction, than organically generated from within. There are also moments that attempt to offer modulation and to ease such overt energy. However, those quieter and more poetic interludes are not given enough milage to land, and their hinting Buddhist lyricism fails to linger long enough for the metaphysical breath.
The Society of New Cuisine is undeniably ambitious and inspiring, and Fung’s commitment to its physical and emotional demands is admirable. It will for sure become a mastermind of modern Buddhist thoughts in theatre, if its philosophical aspirations can be fully metabolised into dramaturgical coherence.