Anxiety. Apprehension. Angst even. Yes, that’s the feeling that rises in me as I come into the auditorium of Omnibus Theatre, in Clapham, south London, to watch Chris Fung perform in his own one-man debut play, The Society for New Cuisine, now updated after a well-received run at the 2023 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. It’s dark, gloomy dark, and the stage is littered with lamps, mics, cables, a red metal chair and another upturned one. At the end there’s a crouching guy with a hoodie next to a grey mural of rasping mouths. Industrial soundscape. Suggests dread. Dark dread. Bad stuff.
Okay, it looks like it’s going to be a monologue about difficult emotions — and it is. It doesn’t disappoint. On a traverse stage, Fung creates an unnamed character who is in trouble, deep trouble. He’s working as a junior lawyer, but buckling under the pressure of corporate stress, with 20-hour days — and a regrettable sexual incident. The women in his life — Beth, Silvie and his Cantonese mother — are all associated with pain. Break up, and breakdown. Bereavement. He starts to ignore his mother’s phone calls because she complains he’s not sending enough money to her, and then his father develops cancer.
Under this kind of pressure, time becomes fluid. One moment, he’s chatting about the sensation of falling, how since childhood he’s been drawn to the feeling you get when you are falling and haven’t landed yet, the next he’s telling us about how migrant families invest in their kids. Which is great for him as the son of a migrant. Except that every investment requires a payback. One moment, he is describing the epic sound that glaciers make when they break up and collapse, with a nod to David Attenborough, the next he’s talking about the death of his wife, his depression and his desperation.
Fung’s text has a exceptional immediacy: every story, every incident is so vividly described that you can instantly picture it, even as he scrambles across the set, picking up mics, changing the lights, selecting places to sit, to walk, to stop, to lie down. In the half-light, Fung is a dynamic stage presence, restless and agitated, then suddenly still, as if resigned to the nightmare that is engulfing him. And it really is a nightmare. In one wild jump, his character discovers The Society for New Cuisine, an ironically titled organization that offers him huge amounts of money if he donates blood to them. But, as he spirals out of control, it soon becomes clear that blood is not enough — they want more.
In this metaphor-rich terror story, the man’s psychosis is medicalized in a kind of Kafkaesque horror show, with physical torture next to psychological collapse. Implicit is the question of how much of yourself are you willing to cut off, to give up, to placate your inner demons and the outer demands of the people close to you. Of course, there is no answer and what remains is the terrible pain of loss, of wrong choices, of ghastly accidents. And it really is terrible. This is surely one of the most intense shows currently on the London stage: I was transfixed.
The effect of The Society for New Cuisine, when you stumble out at the end of the 80-minute experience, is utterly overwhelming: it makes your head hurt; it rips your senses; it makes you feel. Fung performs this journey into the heart of mental darkness with enormous conviction, telling his stories of a shoplifting expedition or a visit to club with real feeling and emotional honesty. And his dancing is wild. Director Rupert Hands keeps the monologue dynamic, with additional recorded voices for the women in the man’s life, and helped by designer Yimei Zhao, and Rajiv Pattani’s lighting and Jamie Lu’s sound. Together they explore the extremes of mental agony in a heart-pounding show of gut-wrenching power.
- The Society for New Cuisine is at Omnibus Theatre until 5 April.
This post was written by the author in their personal capacity.The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of The Theatre Times, their staff or collaborators.
This post was written by Aleks Sierz.
The views expressed here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect our views and opinions.
