I can’t help but think of children using toys to convey repressed trauma.
If you try and make more cheese from less cheese the holes in your plan will soon become obvious, Emmental even. Like everything cheese is a finite resource. Cheese the play by Nikki Schreiber makes this very clear in the maddest possible way. The piece is set in a disused office on Oxford Street and the humble staff welcome you in as one of their colleagues. You sense the foam ceiling is heavy with asbestos as you sit down on the ink-stained swivel chairs.
2008 and London Mortgage Co has gone into receivership along with Lehman Bros and Northern Rock. Before the staff (us) break into wild drinking and karaoke, 3 managerial types decide to perform a play written by one the managers Freya, played with great comic aplomb by Rachel Donovan. Joe, Rube and Freya fall in and out of character, fumble with the props and deliver lines as if their reading from a script scribbled on the back of a beer coaster. They make fantastic use of old office furniture and stationery as they bumble through trying to make sense of their sectors collapse and sudden redundancies. I can’t help but think of children using toys to convey repressed trauma.
The child play that follows leaves us plenty of space to revel in the ridiculousness of it all and to reflect on our own experiences of the great cheese shortage. Cheese, I realise is actually a 5-year retrospective, told the only way a painful story like this can be told; metaphorically.
A Delia Smith type in a bad wig with the price tag still dangling tosses culinary delights (bulldog clips) to distract Joe and Rube from the cheese shortage and a crazy scientist with a machine clones cheese; spin doctoring the financial crisis making it palatable and selling it back to us as ‘everyone’s responsibility’. A faceless nameless antipodean is electrocuted for not toeing the line in a very familiar pecking order experiment. Freya and Joe find an alternative world farming turnips and finally all seems sustainable until Rube resurfaces and tries to convince Joe to invest his turnips. The deal stinks of cheese and Joe declines.
Throughout this consistently hilarious but dark hearted 90 minute play we peel through several set layers; office dividers, a wall of boxes, and finally the office windows revealing the empty offices across the road and two cleaners moving through like tumbleweed. Capitalism out of steam.
CHEESE (a play) by Nikki Schreiber
10 – 28 September 2013