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  1. Culture
29 September 2010

Planet organic

The Kilter theatre company puts down roots on an allotment in Bear Flats, Bath.

By Gina Allum

The Bloomfield allotments in Bear Flats, Bath are the site of Kilter theatre company’s latest outdoor “tale of love and vegetables”, an examination of our relationship with food as we move towards post-oil times. I wondered what sort of a place it was. “Nappy Valley,” answered my companion crisply.

Perhaps, then, Kilter was preaching to the card-carrying converted — the yummy mummies on-message with organics who try to avoid air-freighting baby’s beans. After all, an allotment is the ultimate suburban fantasy of zero-food-miles self-sufficiency — as long as you can top it up with an Ocado shop.

It did look a little like a Boden photo shoot as the audience of mainly women gathered. (Horses or dogs? “Both!”) This was fertile ground indeed for Kilter’s seeds of polemic. But the show, Roots Replanted, was a revelation in this setting. It’s the only performance I can think of where actors were in danger of being upstaged by fruit and veg.

It was a far cry from my patch at home: the killing fields for all but the toughest of brassicas. Gourds were positively bursting out of the soil around us and apples pendulous in the trees above. My companion, a chef and an allotment holder to boot, was at times more seduced by the produce than the production (“divine kohlrabi!”).

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This charming promenade embeds itself in the locale, so characters’ names are taken from nearby streets, and ideas grown from local workshops, or “tea parties” in the pre-Palin sense of the word. The set, such as it is, is put together from bits of old tat found on-site, and locals have contributed an audio record of food-memories, and written notes on childhood cooking: cockle soup on holiday in France; damper bread made by Scouts in the 1950s; a disastrous “mirenge” (sic).

Local history is carefully woven into the experience, and at one point we stood in the crater made by the “Baedeker” raids — the Luftwaffe’s attempt to pulverise Bath’s Georgian heritage. This, we learn, was apparently part of the master plan to blow up all the English cities given three stars by the German guidebook. Just as poignant were the huge horse chestnut trees framing another scene, which were victims of the Greek leaf-miner moth carrying out its own Blitzkrieg along the M4 corridor: living, or perhaps dying, proof of some of Kilter’s eco-themes.

The actors Caroline Garland and Claire Wyatt plait together a tale from Fifties Austerity Britain with a 2060s story of re-engagement with the land, post “Food Riots” and “Protein Poisoning”. They are assisted by a multi-tasking Olly Langdon, horribly irritating as the schlock jock Peter Local, marvellously slack-jawed as the future’s Adam, who slyly scrumps apples, of course.

Audience members are both the children of Beatrice in the Fifties (and as such liable to cleanliness spot-checks) and the elders of Robin, born in 2031 and product of the Wal-Mart education system. Whereas Bea, with her fantastically vivid lipstick and floral pinny, is sick of the “make do and mend” philosophy, and inclines towards the shiny new toys and fast food from across the Atlantic, her Estuarine descendant, from the age of solar cinema and community ovens, reconnects with the land and discovers her roots — and not just her genealogical ones.

Kilter’s entire project is to be carbon-audited. Estimates put the carbon emissions of London’s theatres alone at 50,000 tonnes a year, though in recent times there have been concerted efforts in some quarters to limit this: the Arcola theatre, in particular, has been pioneering hydrogen-fuel-cell lighting, Southwark’s temporary Jellyfish is an entirely recycled theatre, and many others are inhabiting recycled spaces.

Few, however, could compete with the model of sustainability offered by Kilter. The windpower used for its limited light and sound is generated on-site, the set and props are salvaged, and the thinking behind the small tour is to minimise the travelling done by the audience.

There were, perhaps, issues left unaddressed, not least of which is what happens to the Kenyan bean farmer when we buy local or grow our own. And the backbreaking work familiar to anyone who’s ever grubbed around in a kitchen garden is glossed over.

But Kilter is really about the seeding of ideas; we each took home a potted-up damson stone, a tiny metaphor for this hopeful planting. Perhaps, if I keep it away from my own deadly vegetable patch, it might even bear fruit.

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