Chef

Food is never just food, it is a storehouse of memory and the raw ingredient of our dreams. As the eponymous chef plans a series of exquisite dishes, from red wine risotto to curried coconut tofu ("veggies will be particularly excited"), she is able to imagine a future for herself. But she is also propelled backward into recollections of her own lonely and abusive past.

Playwright Sabrina Mahfouz's cleverly looping narrative only reveals its secrets slowly. It is not until the second scene that the audience discovers the young chef with the bright future is speaking from inside jail, and it is not until the last that we find out why she is there. If Mahfouz does not quite manage to adhere to Chef's food philosophy of just keeping it simple, and adds a few too many digressions and repetitions to her script, she does not sacrifice the essential flavour of her dish.

Jade Anouka in the role of Chef gives a more than considerable performance. She makes each audience member feel like she is talking to them, and speaks Mahfouz's verse with a pleading hopefulness which is particularly poignant.

This is not just the story of Chef, but of her mother and her fellow inmate, Candace, too. Three women and their abuse by men. There is a part of me that would have liked to have seen some sort of gesture towards a wider critique of the system which lets such women down. But Chef is not that kind of play – too personal, too close.