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The Food Bank Show Interview

Following ★★★★★ Lessons On Revolution (Summerhall, Soho Theatre), Carmen Collective return with a searing new piece of documentary theatre, piecing together the story of food poverty in the UK. 

Right now, over three million people use food banks in this country. What the f**k has happened?
Based on over a year of in-depth research, The Food Bank Show is an electrifying exploration of a failing system, the people caught in its web, and those striving to change it.

Join acclaimed theatre-maker Sam Rees for an evening of anarchic storytelling filled with rage, hope, and radical conversation. There will be pizza.

Ahead of performances at Camden People's Theatre from Thursday 31st October until Saturday 2nd November 2024 we caught up with Sam Rees to learn more about the show.
What can you tell me about The Food Bank Show?
The Food Bank Show is an exploration of a system that’s gone wrong, incorporating the real-life stories of those experiencing food insecurity, as well as encounters with volunteers, activists and politicians. 

Where did the inspiration for the piece come from?
Over three million people use food banks in this country. The driving force for the show was absolutely not to proselytise or beat people over the head, but to build a space to examine this fact, and to think more deeply about what it means. Sometimes, there are attempts to convince us that this is a normal state of affairs, and the fundamental gesture of the show is to say you’re not crazy for believing it’s not, for looking at this system and thinking: surely we can do better than this.

How did you approach developing the ideas for the show?
An artistic aim for the piece was to keep things entertaining, to avoid getting excessively heavy, so I play a quiz with the audience throughout the show, I tell a load of stupid jokes. I give people pizza when they enter the space. These devices are there to generate a sense of togetherness, to try to break down the formality that can so often inhibit theatre. 

You spent a year researching for the show, what can you tell me about that and what you discovered?
For me, one of the exciting aspects of the piece is that it’s told in ‘real-time’. What this means is that the audience gets to experience me jumping between all these encounters as they happened, and as my own thinking deepened. It also means that events from the last few months have ended up in the piece, so it has this feel of an epic, year-long journey which takes us right up to the present moment. 

How do you go about making a show about something so important and political?
The idea of ‘political theatre’ gets thrown around a lot, and my interpretation of that phrase is a type of performance which doesn’t just address political ideas in the content of its story, but also examines the political processes behind the making of theatre itself. So for instance, it’s all well and good talking about food poverty, but I think everyone would be rightly sceptical if I wasn’t also providing food for our audiences, wasn’t collecting for a local food bank. I think if we want to tackle political themes in our work then we need to consider everything surrounding the actual show as well, and how the context can either augment or oppose the art. 

What do you hope an audience takes away from seeing the show?
I hope they feel entertained, and exhilarated. I hope they don’t feel bludgeoned over the head. I hope, if they have some understanding of food poverty coming in, that they might leave with new contexts for that understanding, and I hope they don’t feel like they’ve been talked at for an hour. The show is this mutual thing between me and the people watching it, as with life, so with art-we’re all in this together!

Where did your arts career begin and how have you approached your career?
I think a lot of people have a similar experience of developing an interest in performing, and then having that initial interest troubled. By the time I reached 21, I'd moved away from the idea of acting and I knew I wanted to make work in collaborative settings. In terms of my approach, I see theatre as a conversation, and that can look like lots of different things. But fundamentally I always come back to thinking okay, we’ve all come to sit in this room together, so what do we want to say to one another? 

What keeps you inspired?
In an industry which is constantly trying to curve our sharp edges, I’m always inspired by work which is true to itself, whatever that might mean.

Where can audiences see the show?
We’re at Camden People’s Theatre from 31st October to 2nd November at 9pm. The show is part of CPT’s The State We’re In Festival 2024, a collection of shows exploring the political climate in the UK right now. It’s massively exciting to present the piece in that context.

Tickets for The Food Bank Show are available from https://cptheatre.co.uk/whatson/The-Food-Bank-Show

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