Actors cook on stage in Scottish theatre

BAFTA Award-winning actress Kate Dickie is known for taking on heavy-weight roles, but she’s never done anything quite like this before.

Pamela Carter, writer and director of What We Know - a funny, bewildering and moving piece of theatre about loss - has used cooking in the play as a device to engage the audience more directly in the journey of her characters.

Lucy (played by Dickie) and her boyfriend Joe (Paul Thomas Hickey) cook a meal live on stage in the course of the performance. Gnocchi is prepared from scratch before hand by the stage manager and is then cooked, along with a puttanesca sauce, by the actors who then go on to eat the food during a dinner party in the third act. Dessert is blancmange made using a vegetarian gelling agent rather than gelatine as Dickie doesn’t eat meat!

The recipes for the dishes have been specifically devised by Rosie Sykes, esteemed food writer and co-author of The Kitchen Revolution, the book from which the recipes have been adapted.

This structure hasn’t really been seen before, drawing the audience in and making them experience the same emotions (and smells!) as the characters they are witnessing. Just be sure to eat dinner before you go.

What We Know is performed at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre from Friday 19 to Saturday 27 February 2010 (8pm).