Review: BISCUITS FOR BREAKFAST, Hampstead Theatre

Biscuits for breakfast. Lassitude for lunch. Don't ask what's for dinner. Gareth Farr's new two hander aims to take a hard-hitting look at the emotional hardship surrounding food poverty. Society's growing reliance on food banks is a subject more than worthy of tender theatrical examination. But questionable writing and an over-stylised production mean Biscuits for Breakfast is far from that. Both overstuffed and underbaked, it does not do its subject matter justice.

At a glance its narrative is familiar territory. A typical love story arc, meet-cute, blossoming romance, relationship trouble, and a make-up. Paul is a kitchen porter and Joanne a maid at a hotel. After it closes they are forced to live hand to mouth relying on each other to survive. Food becomes the lens that magnifies a class divide between them.

Joanne leans on her stoic hardiness, which she developed from a childhood in care homes, to anchor her. Paul meanwhile frays at the seams unable to swallow his pride at accepting help from a food bank or accept that his dream of writing a cookbook is further away than ever.

Paul is an emotional black hole. A capricious man-toddler, delusional to the point of incredulity, he sucks everything into himself. His Freudian fixation on cooking is revealed to be a flimsy plaster slapped on a gaping wound that is unresolved father issues; he obsessively listens to tape recordings of childhood conversations where his late dad dishes out cooking tips and tells him he loves him. How convenient. Don't bother asking who was recording and why. It's one of many details left unexplained.

That is the issue with Biscuits for Breakfast. Too much is left unexplored for its parts to cohere. The trauma is left to float ambiguously and we cannot connect the dots. Paul is rendered irredeemably cruel and unbelievable as a result; in one particularly abrasive hissy fit, he throws Joanna, pregnant with his child no less, out of their flat after an argument about using a food bank. Really?

Would Paul really rather starve himself than break a promise he made to his dead father to never accept food for free? If Farr really thinks the answer is yes, he has neither shown the audience why nor made the emotional tumult behind it palpable. As it stands it feels dramatic for its own sake, something that leaves a bitter taste in the mouth when the subject deserves sensitive handling.

Its execution is flawed too. Semi staccato dialogue gives the performances an oddly icy tone, nothing resembles the warmth of a real relationship. The staging exacerbates things with frivolous style; a traverse set with audience on either side stretches them out but somehow also squashes them horizontally like hieroglyphs. The production feels about as two dimensional.

Biscuits for Breakfast plays at Hampstead Theatre until 10 June

Photography Credit: Alessandro Castellani

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