Last Updated on December 12, 2024
The world premiere of Gareth Farr’s new play is an intimate and alarming story of food poverty in Britain.
Biscuits for Breakfast has one overarching message: people in Britain are starving. While not didactic, Gareth Farr’s new play must be taken as a call to action – to donate one’s time, money, and resources and, most importantly, to consider one’s vote carefully in next year’s general election.
The play begins when “normal” Paul (Ben Castle-Gibb) invites fellow clubber Joanne (Boadicea Ricketts) for dinner to experience his, quite literally, life-changing fish pie. Paul is a talented chef at the local hotel with dreams of releasing a cookbook and getting more out of life than is offered by the small fishing town on the Cornish coast where he lives. Joanne cleans rooms at the same hotel, content with her job and her lifestyle, and far less interested in the alchemy of creative cooking. When the hotel closes, they are made redundant. Food – simultaneously a necessity of survival, Paul’s medium of expression and what he sees as his ticket to a better life – becomes scarce. Food is no longer the raw material of art, but rather an agonising symbol of the dying dream of something more.
The stage, designed by Cecilia Carey, is a runway that dissects the audience. The space is used to full effect, a clear metaphor for the emotional distance between the characters. One’s gaze is moved from one side of the stage to the other like one is watching a tennis match. Ben Castle-Gibb and Boadicea Ricketts are utterly convincing as Paul and Joanne, in what is a tragically realist script. One constantly wills them together from opposite ends of the stage and finds oneself hoping that the runway is just too long for either of them ever to reach the end and step off the edge.
The characters are given depth by their family-based backstories – Joanne grew up in foster care, and Paul cannot move on from the death of his father, to whom he had promised that he would carve a better life for himself. Joanne is resilient and Paul is fragile. Unemployment, or barely sufficient employment, takes its toll on both and traps them in a net of their pasts. But the play conveys that no one, regardless of their history, can survive food poverty – near starvation, in fact – without the re-opening of old scars, and the creation of new ones.
While Paul’s relationship with his dead father is the driving force of the play, Joanne is the play’s heart. When Paul’s hope collapses, so does he, and Joanne is left to fight for their survival. She is the one who goes to the food bank, she is the one who works long hours at the local garlic bread factory to earn a meagre wage for the two of them, and she is the one with a fire inside her that Paul cannot summon. While cooking, Paul’s livelihood and passion is creatively mimed throughout by Castle-Gibb and Ricketts, Joanne’s work takes place off-stage. Her outbursts of justified rage – about being ignored and mistreated – are all the more powerful as a result.
At times, Paul’s constant replaying of tape recordings of his dad feels contrived. Some of the dialogue is cliché, although this is acknowledged by Paul in the play. However, the script is excellent, and the humour, grief and desperation are brought out by the impressive acting of the two-person cast.
Ultimately, while there is so much to say about the deep and engaging nature of Biscuits for Breakfast, one cannot help but react with one, single thought: food poverty, especially on the scale it has reached, should not be happening in a country as affluent as ours. Gareth Farr’s play, as do most of the plays at the Downstairs at the Hampstead Theatre, frames an urgent political issue in a rich and tender context.
Biscuits for Breakfast at the Hampstead Theatre runs until Saturday 10th June. Buy tickets here.
HAMPSTEAD THEATRE,
ETON AVENUE,
SWISS COTTAGE,
LONDON, NW3 3EU
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