Review: Tea Is An Evening Meal, Northern Stage at St Stephens, Edinburgh Fringe

Written for Culture Wars

Sat around a sturdy wooden kitchen table, we’re served tea by Faye Draper, who’s playing mum, as it were. There are biscuits to boot. Bourbons and Custard Creams, if you’re interested. Each of us has a mug of our own, presumably accumulated over years of token gifts and charitable activities. The room feels familiar and warm.

Giving is a recurring motif at Northern Stage, where a morning’s theatregoing can see you come away with a third-pint of milk, an inspirational banana and a bag of retro sweets on top of this genial teabreak. Erica Whyman’s team have built a venue on small acts of kindness, on heart and care and home-made cookies; a worthy home-from-home in Forest Fringe’s absence.

Presented by Third Angel, Tea Is an Evening Meal is the homeliest of all. It might be light on thinking, a survey that elevates breadth over depth and descriptive detail above all else, but it lets your mind wonder to a personal space. There’s a nostalgic glow, rich and snug, that takes you off to family and rainy afternoons and malt loaf and scrabble with a vaguely Proustian twang.

Ostensibly, Draper’s aim is to examine the Northern character through its idiosyncratic table manners. An extended section on the vagaries of meal times trots through the universality of breakfast, before opening the thorny issue of dinner, tea and supper; a topic that needs a round-table discussion. Instead, we can an oblong that slowly – saltily – transforms into a map of Britain.

Really, though, it’s an ode to kitchen tables: to stubborn children refusing their greens and Christmas dinners that repeat year on year. Draper walks behind us, placing a hand on our shoulders and allocates us characters, not to play, but to stand in for momentarily. Someone’s the grandfather imagining what it’s like to sit at the head of the table, having never had the chance due to older brothers and grown-up children. There’s the man alone at a restaurant, stood up perhaps or just content with his own company, and the girls guzzling milk before a night on the town.

Draper makes a thoroughly likeable host and, slight though it is, Tea Is An Evening Meal is a tender charmer.