Play List: Theme - Plays That Feature Food

Here you can find a selection of theatrical plays based around the theme of food. Each play listed includes cast size, genre, the setting and a review. All of the plays listed have been tested with my play reading group.

Key:           

Cast Sizes - Small 2-6; Medium 7-12; Large 13+

Copies - Number of copies currently held at the NewSPAL library in Ewell

Alan Ayckbourn - Table Manners

Genre: Comedy                                           Cast: Mixed, Medium  Copies 8

Setting A dining room. Now.

Reg and his two sisters, Ruth and Annie, are each burdened with spouses who do not suit them. Reg – a hearty, laughter-filled, good fellow – is married to the controlling and martial mother of two, Sarah. Ruth has the open marriage from hell with Norman, an assistant librarian, while she struggles to balance career and a personal life that includes not wearing her much-needed glasses. Annie lives at home to take care of their mother and she is being wooed somewhat vaguely by the local vet, Tom. When Annie agrees to go away for a “weekend” with Norman, all hell is let loose. Circumstances, however, prevent this journey. Everything in the four scenes of the play is centred on the table and the potential for a meal.

Caryl Churchill - Top Girls

Genre:                                                       Cast: Female, Medium  Copies 15

Setting England, 1980s

The play centres on Marlene, a career-driven woman who is heavily invested in women's success in business. The play examines the roles available to women in old society, and what it means or takes for a woman to succeed. highlighting the different sides of being a thriving career woman in the 1980s.The realities of being female and the potential price of achieving success are explored, famously using iconic female, historical figures at a restaurant.

Patrick Hamilton – Rope

Genre: Drama, Thriller                                 Cast: Mixed, Medium  Copies 8

Setting Mayfair, London 1929

Two young university students, Wyndham Brandon and Charles have murdered fellow student Ronald Kentley as an expression of their supposed intellectual superiority. At the beginning of the play, they hide Kentley's body in a chest. They proceed to host a party for his friends and family at which the locked chest containing his corpse is used to serve a buffet. Suspicion arises among the guests as to the content of the chest. After the party, one guest, a former professor of the murderers, returns and contrives to open the chest. He is shocked and ashamed that they have acted in response to his own declarations of amorality. The play ends with this quandary unresolved.

Noel Coward - Hay Fever

Genre: Comedy                                           Cast: Mixed, Medium  Copies 36

Setting An English country house,  1920s

The four eccentric members of the upper-class Bliss family each invite a guest to spend the weekend, without telling the others. The self-centred outlandish behaviour of the hosts finally drives their guests to flee while the Blisses are so engaged in a family row that they do not notice their guests' departure.

There is an interesting breakfast scene, which puts the play into this category!

More themes, and more individual plays will be added as they are read.

If you would like me to add a play you have read, please let me know.