The Society for New Cuisine – Omnibus Theatre, London

Writer: Chris Fung

Director: Rupert Hands

In the face of unimaginable trauma, it’s not unknown for someone to spiral. That’s certainly true for the protagonist of Chris Fung’s solo play, The Society for New Cuisine, restaged and updated at the Omnibus Theatre after a well-received 2023 Edinburgh Festival Fringe run.

Fung’s character is facing pressure from all sides. In his work, he’s a junior lawyer on a team overseeing a merger, meaning that he works 20-hour days, seven days a week. He’s ignoring calls from his Cantonese mother, first because she complains that he’s not sending enough money home and then because he doesn’t want to deal with news of his father’s cancer.

But there are darker, more mysterious things hanging over him. Time is fluid; first, he gives us a glimpse of an extraordinarily bad attempt to chat up the woman of his dreams, and then suddenly, he is grieving her loss three years after her sudden death. As Fung’s play progresses, the sense of his linear deterioration battles an increasingly fragmentary timeline for the audience’s attention.

Fung himself is charismatic, pulling us from scene to scene with sheer force of will. He and director Rupert Hands bring a lo-fi, high-tech aesthetic to the work; those with whom the protagonist converses are portrayed by floor lamps shining in his direction (and, somewhat annoyingly, sometimes directly into the eyes of the audiences on either side of the traverse staging). Their voices are sometimes played in from recordings; most effectively, they are provided by Fung, his voice picked up by a microphone and electronically pitched upwards and downwards.

Those scenes where Fung plays against himself work into the play’s suggestion that his character’s mental health is breaking down. Some reckless behaviour is egged on by a new girlfriend, Sylvie, who is never around when he faces the consequences. As Fung’s narrative veers through time, it remains unclear which scenes exist in the real world, and which in the character’s head.

As the character experiences a mysterious organisation that pays him for blood transfusions and then, later, for other extractions, there is a move towards body horror that, in the oppressively dark and atmospheric set, produces chills. But the narrative twists, and the connections between the various strands of Fung’s story, end up lost in the shadows. While the resistance to being too obvious as to how his narrative threads connect is admirable, it results in a piece which is as baffling as it is, at times, intensely captivating.

Continues until 5 April 2025