PERFORMANCE & COMEDY

The Church of St Thomas The Martyr, Bristol (Fri 7-Sat 8 May)

THEATRE It’s not very often that a jaunt to the theatre involves pitching up at a Georgian church, having your hands washed in a ewer, and then being ushered towards a large, white-cloth’d table laid out beneath a stunning altar piece. Then again, Stand + Stare rarely do things by halves (as last year’s Mayfest offering ‘SS Arcadia’ proved), and for ‘The Guild of Cheesemakers’, the Bristol-based immersive specialists really pushed the boat out. Not so much members of an audience as guests at a rather top-notch foodie gathering, we took our places at the table, were greeted by the head of the Guild, one Amelia Reed (Naomi Said), and were talked through a selection of cheese, breads and wines (with – woohoo – real samples to try) by yer actual experts from Trethowan’s Dairy, Hobbs House Bakery and Avery’s Wines. Except that this proved to be no ordinary gastronomic tasting. While we chowed down on a slice of blue-veined Stichelton and sipped at an eminently quaffable sherry, weird stuff started happening: most notably, the mention of a meteorite and a mystery cheese known as 198 which purportedly conferred the gift of eternal life, albeit at the cost of human fertility. The tasting session mutated around us into a gothic sci-fi yarn as Amelia revealed herself to be a 200-year-old 198 addict and introduced us to Mr Spalding (Nick Young), her erstwhile lover and another, somewhat more louche bicentenarian. As they re-enacted their first encounter with the intergalactic fromage du vie and listened to a dire warning issued by Amelia’s Gandalf-esque father Cornelius (Henry Amphlett), the story mutated again, this time into something a tad more philosophical than a cheesy episode of ‘Doctor Who’: was immortality, as Mr S insisted, a right old laugh? Or did it, as Amelia claimed to have discovered, reduce life to nothing more than a meaningless game? True to the company’s audience-involving spirit, it fell to ‘the guild’ (i.e. us) to decide whether 198 should be destroyed or replicated and mass produced. Perhaps surprisingly, we voted in favour of mortality, and up in the organ loft the elixir-oozing ‘meteorite’ went, erm, pop. Whilst on paper, this probably all sounds... well, a bit cheesy, ‘The Guild of Cheesemakers’ proved to be an effective and engaging combination of foody indulgence and Victorian-style moral fabling, a sort of multisensory cabaret with a pleasingly chewy pay-off. Makes you wonder what Stand + Stare’ll serve up next. (Eric Blair) ****

Copyright Eric Blair 2011