La cuisine à la scène: Boire et manger au théâtre du XXe siècle [Cuisine onstage: Food and drink in 20th-century theatre] by Athéna-Hélène Stourna (review)

Athéna-Hélène Stourna’s book offers a wide-ranging reflection on the role that food and drink play in modern theatre. Others, notably John Wilkins (2000), Chris Meads (2001), Joan Fitzpatrick (2007), and Ronald Tobin (1985), have focused on the treatment of culinary and gastronomic themes in earlier works for the stage, from ancient Greek comedy, to English Renaissance drama, to Shakespeare, to Molière. But this is the first book-length study to tackle such themes in theatre from the late 19th century through the present. As this is a revision of Stourna’s doctoral dissertation, defended at the University of Paris III, Sorbonne-Nouvelle in 2010, it’s not surprising to find in it the advantages and disadvantages of that well-oiled rhetorical machine, the French thèse. It treats a well-defined research area in an admirably ambitious spirit of comprehensiveness, but at the expense of the more compelling, synthetic, overarching argument that might be achieved through more selective analysis.

Stourna begins by examining the role of actual food in theatre. After some brief background on the use of real and artificial foodstuffs in theatre from the 18th century onward, she moves on to the consumption of food and drink in realist and naturalist theatre, with particularly long and fruitful consideration of Anton Chekhov. Her next section looks at cooking and representations of kitchens onstage from 1888 to 1988, beginning with plays by August Strindberg and Matthias Langhoff, then continuing with works by Arnold Wesker, Ariane Mnouchkine, Stephen Daldry, Harold Pinter, Günter Grass, Michel Vinaver, and Franz Xaver Kroetz, among others, while pausing along the way to consider changes in our collective vision of the kitchen and the development of a consumer society, scrutinizing in particular how these phenomena have been depicted through the visual arts. In the following section she turns to the use of food as metaphor and artistic medium in avantgarde plays and performances, from Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi through the Bread and Puppet Theater. The final section tackles the historical, political, and social implications of food in contemporary theatre, with examples from productions in Latin America, the United States, Catalonia, Greece, France, and Germany.

Stourna’s approach to her subject is historical and thematic, taking into account as well its social, political, and aesthetic dimensions. One might regret that her study is not more deeply gastronomic in its orientation, paying closer attention to the cultural and historical specificity of foodways, and to the evolution of gastronomy as an art form in its own right. But Stourna, despite her interest in the table, is above all a scholar and practitioner of the theatre (currently serving as artistic director of the Okypus Company in Greece), so food and drink, while providing a lens through which she analyzes theatre, remain secondary to her primary focus on theatre itself, which she analyzes knowledgeably, and with a keen eye to telling detail.

The book contains 27 black-and-white illustrations, mainly photographs of theatrical productions, with some drawings of sets and certain period caricatures. Almost all of these images are small, however, and of mediocre quality, undermining their usefulness as documentation. There are also 16 color illustrations — 11 photographs of artworks used as comparisons, and 5 of stage productions. These color images are generally larger and sharper than the ones in black-and-white. This discrepancy gives an unfortunate impression that is at odds with the love of the stage so evident in Stourna’s prose: in her book’s images, theatre seems gray, drab, and indistinct, while the visual arts stand out, in contrast, as something vibrant, colorful, and dynamic.

The book has two indexes, one listing names of...