Geoff Sobelle is bringing magic to the Maj and shamelessly playing with his FOOD at Perth Festival 2024. He’s a maitre d’ like no other, taking audiences on a food odyssey that begins with the origins of life on Earth and fast forwards to farm-to-table foodie fantasies and fast food. Right from the start, Sobelle had us eating from the palm of his hand.
Once everyone has settled either at the giant table centre stage or in the tiered 3/4 seating around the table, Sobelle asks us to close our eyes; he begins a kind of guided meditation (or maybe he’s hypnotising us) that focuses our attentions to his voice, the sounds in the room, and the images his words conjure in our heads. When he ends, we open our eyes to his first illusion, and we’re under his spell.
If you ever wanted to have a meal with Stanley Tucci, this is probably the closest you’re going to get. Sobelle is generous, efficient, precise, and completely in control of every moment in FOOD, as he makes his way around the table to take people’s orders, serve the food, pour the wine, deliver the bill. He quietly delivers quick instructions to audience members who participate frequently throughout the evening, through mics and menus containing scripted lines.
Once the ‘meal’ has concluded, Sobelle takes a load off and proceeds to have a meal himself from the ‘leftovers’. It starts with an apple, then two, then three or four, then continues with a whole bowl of cherry tomatoes, an entire celery stalk, several raw eggs…and on and on…This messy and grotesque binge continues until he’s inhaled everything in sight, including a mouthful of lit cigarettes and a mobile phone. This is all magic, of course (co-created with magician Steve Cuiffo), but done so well that an audience member audibly says “Stop!” after Sobelle gulps down his fourth or fifth cherry tomato. I don’t know where he put everything, maybe up his sleeves, maybe under the table, but nothing fell out later on.
With this display of gluttony/expert illusion, Sobelle has taken us into decidedly darker territory. He yanks the giant tablecloth from the table, revealing what is essentially a giant sandbox. The rest of the show is spent using toys and miniature props pulled from or placed in the dirt to illustrate the increasingly fraught conditions of our food supply chain in the western world. As an audience member recites a list of cultivated and engineered foods, we are confronted with the staggering and sobering evolution of consumption.
Of course, every magic show has assistants to ensure the illusions go off without a hitch, and FOOD has a production team that is both behind and under the scenes. The sound design by Tei Blow (with associate Tyler Kieffer) deserves special mention here for its subtle, gradual immersive effects, along with stage manager Kelsey Vivian and assistant stage manager RED, who made sure every prop popped when it was supposed to.
FOOD‘s use of childhood trappings (toys, mechanised miniatures, puppets, and illusion) to demonstrate the planet’s looming ecological crisis kept us from feeling overwhelmed with doom and hopelessness. Sobelle managed to maintain the sense of wonder he had established early on, which made it very difficult to leave the space once the show was over. I think most of us wanted to go back for seconds.
CICELY BINFORD
FOOD runs from 21 Feb – 2 Mar at His Majesty’s Theatre as part of Perth Festival. For tickets and more information, visit here.
