Cooking with Elvis

by Lee Hall

Directed by Gareth Tudor Price

at Hackney Empire

291 Mare Street, Hackney London E18 1EJ

Call +44 0208 8510 4500 Tickets £10 -£15

Mon – Sat 7.45pm Sat Mat 2.30pm

Running time 2 hours with intermission

Through October 29, 2005

                                         Long Live The King!

Cooking with Elvis is about food, fate, sex…and Elvis. What more could you want? Not much, if you believe writer Lee Hall. When an amateur Elvis Presley impersonator is paralysed in a car crash, his daughter turns to cooking, his wife to sex. Part knockabout farce, part cookery course, part philosophical investigation, you are invited to partake vicariously of three great pleasures in life: sex, food and The King.

The excellent Hull Truck company’s credo is ‘to make the popular challenging, and the challenging popular’. This means that their audiences can expect to be surprised, and one does go to a Hull Truck play with certain expectations.

Starting life as a radio show, Cooking With Elvis had a successful West End run after a transfer from Edinburgh Festival, and is now touring the UK. It is an hilarious, decadent, black comedy, whose writing seems to fall easily from the lips of the Geordie (NW England) characters, but I could hear the Southern States providing the same character studies, too. It can’t be too long before US audiences are treated to this piece. The darkly comic flair of director Gareth Tudor Price and the cast brought forth peals of laughter, and when not actually laughing, I found my face in a perpetual smile.

There are real emotions flying around as well. An attempted suicide and a nod in the direction of ‘Whatever Happened to Baby Jane’ add richness to the mix. We see the Elvis act that probably seduced mom in the first place, and we also see that she once shared a life with a special performer in his own right, but now lives in a bleak, working class apartment with a daughter, a turtle, the shell of a husband and a lost fantasy.

Under the nose of the wheelchair bound, comatose, Elvis-impersonator dad, mom brings her boyfriend, Stuart, into the house as a lodger. Stuart soon has his way with the 14 year old daughter, and also manages to help out poor old dad, one part of whom is still working.  Jackie Lye, as mom, explains that she is merely being practical. After all, she is ‘living with a vegetable’. ‘It’s not my fault your father’s a cabbage’, she says to daughter, Jill, Natalie Blades, who, obsessed with food, doesn’t approve, until some of the fun comes her way, too. Chris Connel, baring (almost) all, is the boyfriend trying to cope with all this attention. Although at times unnecessarily playing to the gallery, and not quite at home with the acoustics of the Edwardian venue, the company reveal the comic timing and ensemble work of Hull Truck in top form.

Dad leaves his wheelchair from time to time to give us his (very good) act. ‘When the President said to me “You wear some outrageous clothes”, I said to him, “Mr. President, you’ve got your show to do, and I’ve got mine”’. The irresistible Elvis Presley numbers, a generation’s addictive, mind altering drugs in themselves, are stuffed with production and lighting effects by lighting designer, Graham Kirk. With Elvis/dad, Sean Oliver, singing and strutting with panache, white spangled jump suit and all, we understand what it must have been like for those who witnessed the dazzling charisma and talent of one of the greatest ever performers, and we indeed glimpse The King as he works the audience in a way so many have copied.Lovely stuff.  An audience royally entertained.

     Highly Recommended

 Saul Reichlin

Chicago Stage Talk Radio Show

30 Oct 2005