Writer and Director: Natasha Markou
Poetic and nostalgic, Natasha Markou’s two-hander about memory and food could easily be a radio play. Apart from a short scene where the eponymous Dick Fiddler, now called Ben, chops a red onion, the actors are mainly sitting on a bench talking in paradoxes and contradictions: “People will always come. Until they don’t”.
While the performers are terrific, especially Julia Righton, who plays Jenny, a kind of motherly angel, the real joy of this piece, showing as part of this year’s Voila!, London’s multicultural theatre festival, is the words. They evoke honeyed evenings on Greek islands and help us to imagine we are tasting sweet mint, earthy lamb and the musk of rosemary. Sometimes the performers’ movements around the bench placed in the centre of the stage distract from the play’s studied lyricism.
Its story, slender and strange, begins with a ghost, his head bandaged, being offered a second chance. When he was alive, he was Dick Fiddler, and he was probably both of the epithets when he made a mess of his rainbow trout business. But Jenny gives him the opportunity to start again, this time as a chef, a profession that is good for the mind and the heart. He agrees to the challenge. He decides this new self will be named Ben.
Initially, their stylised dialogue comes across as stilted. They speak in two-word phrases with no thought for prepositions: adjectives and nouns or nouns and verbs. And yet, their back-and-forth manner eventually becomes soothing like the ebb and flow of the ocean, the catch and fall of memories half-remembered while sitting outside a taverna watching a sun that forgets to set.
It must be difficult to memorise such a rendered script. However, Pravessh Rana and Julia Righton don’t miss a beat and work together beautifully, particularly as their roles begin quietly to switch. For a short run in a small venue, the sound and the lighting designs are fine, but there’s a sense that these could work more effectively to give the 60-minute play a better focus on time and place. And it’s a shame that with all the Greek dishes being described, we are left with the bitter taste of onion in our mouths and the cosy smell of talcum powder.
Runs until 7 November 2025
Voila! Theatre Festival 2025 runs until 23 November
