May Contain Food review – meat arias and rice riffs go down a treat

It’s best not to eat before you go to see Protein’s latest show, since there could be no more misleading a title than May Contain Food. From the displays of real, fake and tinned produce that decorate the tables where the audience are seated, to the salivating detail of the show’s text and lyrics, this is a production that is glutted with food.

Choreographer Luca Silvestrini and composer Orlando Gough have combined to anatomise what is, in its style, a very first-world obsession. Four dancers and four singers act as our waiters in a show that’s structured like a 90-minute meal.

Weaving around the restaurant-cum-auditorium, the waiters serve us with a mini tasting menu that includes a “sweet aperitif tomato” and a ball of “Japanese short-grain (possibly Fairtrade) rice”. Between courses, they entertain us with multiple riffs on the eating habits of our times.

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Using an adroit fusion of song, dance and mime the show surveys the complexities of our relationship with food – the politics, pretensions, neediness and guilt. A mother cajoles her reluctant child to eat while a couple endure the chill of an anniversary dinner. A sanctimonious chorus reminds us of the virtues of going organic, for the sake of the planet as well as our privileged taste buds. Donna Lennard sings a succulent, carnivorous aria to meat, yet as she presses her body sensuously against a wall she leaves a queasy trail of blood. Meanwhile, the dancers transform themselves into bleating, squawking animals, and by means of ingenious duets contrive to serve themselves up to us on platters.

The cast are excellent, so multi-skilled that it’s often hard to distinguish singers from dancers. Gough’s a capella score is equally various, ranging from acerbic satire to a chorus of Balkan-sounding harmonies that evoke the ancient, ceremonial power of food. By the end, the tone of the production feels more entertaining than subversive but it does throw some perfectly aimed barbs at the weirdness, excess and complacency of today’s foodie culture.