There is a warm welcome to the Food Bank Show. Sam Rees is chatting to arrivals as they take their seats, asking people to guess the number of macaroni in a glass jar. A member of the crew offers free pizza to everybody.
The quiz question is part of a conversational style that mixes documentary contributions from various people via recordings with some shocking statistics, along with projections onto the screen at the back of the stage of live drawings from the impressive artist Mo Pittaway, working stage left on a tablet. Soon, we see a screened picture of the former MP Jacob Rees-Mogg alongside his 2017 statement that "food banks are a very uplifting thing.”
I suppose they are for an MP of a constituency that includes the town of Keynsham, where we hear the State has left “one in five children” living in poverty. Food banks will carry out the work the government has neglected to do.
Something of that “uplifting” experience is expressed by Olivia (not her real name), a food bank user who tells Sam via a recording, “how it feels? Like shitty… being hungry totally fucks with you. Your energy and your mood and stuff… You just get the feeling that actually we’re an inconvenience to everyone”.
And we hear from Sam that the “uplifting” experience is increasing with an additional “two hundred and sixty-eight thousand people” using food banks last year, bringing the grand total to over three million. At the same time, we are told that “9.5 million tonnes of food” was thrown away last year.
But then the supermarkets must have lots of money. It is mentioned that the CEO of Tesco gets “40,000 pounds a week, which amounts to about 2 million a year. If you add in his shares, and his bonuses, his yearly pay packet amounts to around 10 million”.
Among those speaking in the show about the issue of poverty is Ian Byrne, the Labour MP for Liverpool and West Derby, where one in three people “are in food poverty”. It’s part of the reason he felt compelled to vote to abolish the two-child benefit cap, for which he was rewarded by being kicked out of the Parliamentary Labour Party for six months.
Sam includes ideas about what would change things. Olivia has some great suggestions. As for the contribution of theatre, Sam claims he is “increasingly sceptical about the capacity for theatre... as a tool to change the world... its best offer is a managed decline... A space for nothing much to happen in a pleasant way.”
Rubbing salt into the wound, he recalls a conversation with a private equity bloke outside a performance of the powerful anti-capitalist play Lessons On Revolution, which he wrote with Gabriele Uboldi.
He told Sam that he liked the show but that it was “a lot more complicated than just overthrowing the capitalist system”. There is an audible gasp from the audience when we hear that the useful stuff the company that employs him does is “to buy up disused property. And he tells me that his company bought up the building that the Vault Festival used to be in.”
Mr Equity says, “if you tax the rich, they’ll all leave the country, and again I want to ask him if I can get that in writing.”
Many activists are trying to draw attention to the problem via pressure groups, protests and simply volunteering at food banks. Sam tells us about activists whose novel contribution to the food issue is to occasionally wear black balaclavas and dance across the aisles of some supermarkets collecting food without paying to deposit it at a food bank.
However, this entertaining and informative performance concludes with a different kind of hopeful moment, one that mobilises our imagination to take us beyond that particular show.
Maybe we should arrange for it to be shown to Members of Parliament.