Review: Stuffed

For about 40 minutes this is a remarkable piece of theatre. From the top, a peculiar tone is set as a workie cartoonishly, eagerly lights up a cigarette. He moves, unexpectedly, over to a beat machine and chaos pads, firing up a hard and heavy wall of sound that supports the following scenes about food banks, the people who make them happen, the context they happen in, and the deadening, depressing destruction of a whole section of the working population.

“This is a totally unoriginal production,” Ugly Bucket Theatre’s cast of five tell us. “You’ve heard this all before”. And, of course, we have. We know about the interminable growth of food banks and the acceptance of them as socially endemic. We know about the referrals which catalogue the desperation of adults and children. But we’ve never seen it presented like this, with a deft and disarming touch that owes its heritage more to clowning than kitchen sink drama.

Plastic bags are juggled as a military march shows us the slick operation of the warehouses. Two pigeons dramatise the scrap over crumbs in our joke of a trickle down economy. It’s always visually and sonically interesting; never melodramatic or didactic. If we have to present this differently to tell you again, Ugly Bucket seem to be saying, then we will. Again, and again and again. But those last 20 minutes lose that theatrical drive, with a tell not show approach that swaps deftness for repetitive didacticism. Maybe that’s OK, and there’s a legitimate point at which the expansion of the imagination needs to give way to action. Something needs to be different, though, and those first 40 minutes were just that.