Pasta made on spot is a recipe for drama
Skylight actor cooks spaghetti on stage in an appetizing performance
Sara Topham scrapes the seeds from a tiny but powerful bird’s eye chili.
It’s careful work, best done with gloves or access to running water. Topham has neither. She is cooking tomato sauce onstage during Skylight, the David Hare play running until July 9 at the Berkeley Street Theatre. The process, besides producing tempting aromas, cleverly underlines the deep emotions simmering within the main characters.
“It’s the hardest thing I’ve done since the second half of Noises Off,” Topham said.
“It’s physics. You can’t will it to be hotter or colder or slower or quicker than it is. Every onion is different.”
Her character, Kyra, is a teacher living alone in London. Her former lover, an older restaurateur named Tom, pops in. She cooks to distract herself, Topham said during a preopening demonstration.
When Kyra dumps the onions into the pan, the sizzle mirrors her unstated anger. The lid on a pot of boiling pasta rattles as she and Tom reach the height of an argument.
There’s a working vintage stove and refrigerator on set but stage hands pump in water following the actor’s cues.
Topham uses a small Japanese knife to neatly dice an onion, which the prop master keeps in the fridge, to reduce tears. She chops garlic and carrots, sautéing them in a frying pan before adding flavoured stewed tomatoes.
The result, which I get to taste, is a decent marinara made sweeter by the carrots. It is not, as the Observer reviewer described in 2014, spaghetti bolognese.
“Meat needs a long time to be safe. Also, I decided (Kyra) had become a vegetarian, which would piss (Tom) off,” Topham said.
Topham, who cooks at home, practised her timing with piles of scrap paper representing chopped vegetables before switching to real food. She had only one uninterrupted runthrough before the first dress rehearsal.
Rehearsal mishaps included getting chili oil in the eyes and having vegetables fall on the floor. A box of Band-Aids waits in the kitchen drawer.
Cast mate Lindsay G. Merrithew, who plays Tom, does his part grating parmesan on stage. He likes the richness of the odours produced, uncommon in theatre productions.
“That sensory feeling is quite wonderful,” Merrithew said.
Not every theatregoer appreciates the Smell-O-Vision aspect: “It adds nothing to the play but the lingering, and unpleasantly distracting, aroma of sautéed onions” one New York Times commenter said. Inside the Berkeley Theatre, the smell wafts to the corners of the auditorium.
In the end, Kyra doesn’t eat the pasta, only the sauce, scooping it up cold with bread.
Will Topham eat this sauce once the run is over? “Never, ever again,” she vowed. She remembers acting in Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding, where the cast and audience ate baked ziti with broccoli every night.
“If I ever need to act sick for an audition, I just have to conjure up that smell,” she said with a shudder. Email: apataki@thestar.ca, Twitter: @amypataki