Theatre as Research: The Hunger for Trade project

How often do you think about the food you eat? By which we don't mean thinking about which takeaway you fancy tonight, or whether that double-chocolate mocha with whipped cream is going to wreck your diet; no, we mean: how often do you actually really seriously think about what you eat, where it comes from and how it gets to your mouth? And how often do you think about what that process actually shows about the world we live in today?

Hunger for Trade, an international event overseen by the Hamburg-based Schauspielhaus and orchestrated between several countries, cities, and theatres, including the Royal Exchange, Manchester, sets out to “raise people's awareness of the fact that the one thing that is innate in our lives – our need to eat – is also very politically charged. People rarely think about where their food comes from or the political infrastructures behind that.” 

That’s how Simon Stephens – the man in charge of mentoring the Manchester project’s four playwrights – puts it. Stephens was asked to choose who he saw as the four most exciting young writers from a Royal Exchange shortlist, and guide them on their way as they each wrote a short theatre piece in response to Manchester’s position in the global food trade. “I was looking for intelligence and imagination and linguistic energy and wit and a sense of dramatic action. And a sense of adventurousness… but also the sort of writer I thought could be challenged by this,” he says. Those writers turned out to be Miriam Battye, Alistair McDowall, Kellie Smith and Brad Birch. 

Research has been a key element in the Hunger for Trade process, and its results are to be delivered not only in these playwrights' short theatre pieces, but also in a whole series of dialogues, performances and interventions staged at the Royal Exchange between 24 April and 3 May. This research has drawn on discussions with figures from all around Manchester who occupy varying positions and levels of involvement in the global food industry and include people from the University of Manchester and from Cargill – an international agricultural, financial and industrial producer – as well as restaurateurs, food activists and anything in between. The idea was that, from a mound of investigation and information almost paralysing in its size, each writer would get a sense of a certain thing that interested them – and then the theatre itself would help them research that point in more detail.  

Brad Birch has found the Hunger for Trade project to be “like nothing else,” and feels that his role – and the role of the other playwrights – is not to try to become the authority on the subject or just present a bundle of statistics, but to explore topics around the food trade in a way that an audience can grasp and empathise with. “It was clear from the start that we’re not the experts,” he says, “nor would we become experts. We are, at the end of the day, just artists. It’s about our reactions to the issues.” He feels that the purpose of Hunger for Trade is not to bombard audiences with information and opinions but to express a creative reaction. “It would be hard for it not to be [political]; there are grave injustices within the food industry… but it’s not going to hit you over the head with ideology.”

Between them, the four playwrights have covered a startlingly diverse range of topics, each writer taking a very different approach and picking up on one specific detail of the food trade that they have found particularly intriguing or compelling. 'The food industry' is a lot of issues bundled into one, and indeed Birch found that the most difficult part of his task was avoiding the temptation to tackle all of it at once. Instead, in his piece Tender Bolus, he focuses on the relationship between gluttony, Western consumer society and the global capitalism of the food market. He’s exploring the price of greed and excess on the fragile structures of unsustainable capitalism. “We live in a society where some people are getting surgery to stop themselves eating, and others are finding it difficult to get by,” he explains, adding that he’s saddened by the injustices in the food market that the Hunger for Trade research has confirmed. He’s also curious about “the rituals and mores that we have in our country around food, and the public eating of food. There are certain rules we follow when eating in public in this country… they are kind of implicit.” 

Alistair McDowall’s This Land brings up the notion of copy-writing chemicalised food and geo-crops – exploring whether food is now an idea that can be owned, and therefore policed. Can big business now go to court to claim ownership of natural resources such as the crops that form huge parts of global food supply? Kellie Smith, meanwhile, will change the way you think of chocolate forever with Black Gold, her exploration of the role of African cocoa farmers on the Ivory Coast and the West’s relationship with cocoa, chocolate and the international cocoa trade. 

Miriam Battye, on the other hand, takes a look at the family dinner table as she shows how emotional instability is played out through complicated, comforting, or damaging relationships with food. An evening meal begins to fray at the edges as the strain of a mother’s ambitious career causes family stability to buckle; Balance is Battye’s attempt to examine Western emotional ties with food, be it refusal to eat or finding solace in food or restaurants.

But what’s a theatrical tackling of an issue as huge and terrifying as the global food crisis going to be like for the audiences facing up to Hunger for Trade? “I’m sure there will be moments that are provocative and dark,” admits Stephens, “and moments that are very funny and light… I hope that people have a good time. I don’t think it’s to hector them or teach them, but hopefully it will get them to think about where we get our food from. I think it’s really fascinating.” Stephens proceeds to demonstrate exactly what he means, beginning with the simple question: “What was the last thing you ate today?” I have to think a bit to remember, before coming back with a nectarine. Fruit, so that seems healthy – can’t be too bad in the global scheme of things. Then Stephens starts asking questions. “So then you think: so where did the supermarket get their nectarines from? And who was working at the supermarket, and where do they live when they’re not working?… And what are the nectarine farms like? And what are the work conditions of the people farming nectarines? How do they get all the nectarines to get the right taste? And what happens to the ones that don’t taste right?

“Think about where that nectarine sits in the political infrastructures of the West’s relationship with the rest of the world… and within two minutes you’ve gone from just having a fucking nectarine to thinking about global capitalism.”