Put your face right up to its glow and let it know that you will love it, respect it, think about how it grew, before you smash it in your mouth and munch it quicker than a junkie chick on a shotter’s dick
Her play Chef won a 2014 Fringe First Award and Clean was produced by Traverse Theatre and transferred to New York in 2014.
This here, yeh, this is a peach. A ripe and ready to eat beautiful bit of meaty peach flesh. Now listen, right. If you’d never tasted a peach before – even like, a metally mouthed one from a Basics tin or the kind ya find binded in plastic for lunchboxes or some shit – then when you finally put this peach inside your cakehole you would be like, WOW! How the fuck did you make that Chef? And I could go on, couldn’t I? About how I mixed this ingredient from an island with a long name, with another one that was scavenged from a motorway not far away from where you was born and marinated it for a year, or some such bullshit. But I won’t. Cos I ain’t made it, have I? Life has made it. Mother Earth. So why hurt perfection? Why shake it about with flashes of flour and sparks of sugar, trying to make it look like a bit of puke after a good night out? I mean, what is that about?
Keep it as it is. A bleeding peach. Just make it the best bleeding peach it can be. Soak it in its own juice overnight. Make sure you buy the right ones in the first place. Organic and that, fresh, you know, no pesticides or flies finding their homes in its furry fleshy skin. But don’t be all poncy prick about it, like you know things no-one else could ever know about this dear sweet little peachy poo. Cos after all, a bit later on you’ll be saying a ‘see you later on’ to it all down the shitter.
Her 2016 plays are With a Little Bit of Luck (Paines Plough); Slug (nabokov); Battleface (Bush Theatre); Layla’s Room (Theatre Centre) and The Love I Feel Is Red (Tobacco Factory Theatres)
Yeh, so that’s my, shall we say – philosophy. On the way I like to do my food, for my guests. I don’t want them to have to guess what went into what’s going into them. I just do it plain and simple but so good they never forget ite back every day like they need it to live. Cos here, they kinda do. I give a little bit of myself every day to them, a gift to my loyal guests. Not literally, obviously, I mean I don’t chop a bit of pinky finger into the pot or sprinkle dandruff on top of a stew – let me tell you I ain’t got that, by the way, dandruff, that’s proper rough. I mean, I give from the inside. Yeh. Trust me, I even got some tough women crying from what I can do with a lettuce leaf. As soon as they get that green between their teeth… Well, it’s all over. Who needs diets when veg can taste that good?
This place I’m at now, they aren’t so keen for me to proper experiment, which is all I want. All I want really, it’s all I, it’s all that’s keeping me going really. The dream that one day I’ll be able to cook again my way. Everyone just wants to cook their own way, you know? And I sometimes think, you know I used to think it a lot, when some cocksucker was complaining about it being too hot or not hot enough or it’s a bit salty it’s not as fresh as I like It’s got too much sauce, bit too dry thought this wasn’t fried are you sure this is organic? Where are the sides? Is this all we get? Haven’t you got better bread? The menu said the menu said the menu said – FUCK OFF! I used to think, do you know what this does, this life? It cooks. It feeds. It delivers. It delights. Then it dies. People just sit there, take the plate in front of them, pick at it, lick the side of a spoon. Feel no way about pooling groups of unwanted food together at the edges and when it comes back, where do you think it goes? We see it, we see them. Bulging black bags heaving with life sustenance that has been rejected, like the time from my life it took to prepare it never really mattered. Like the farmer, the lorry driver, the packer, like none of us even matter. How much do you think – do you think we matter? Us sorry lot who somehow grow food or make it palatable, make it something edible?