La Cucina dell'Arte; cooking for clowns

La Cucina dell’arte
Circus Ronaldo (Belgium)
Auckland Arts Festival
Circus Rinaldo, Aotea Square
Until March 20

This isn’t Master Chef. It isn’t even close to being the Art of the Kitchen or the Art of Cooking. It’s more of an advertisement for takeaway pizza.

It’s all very confusing, the title “La Cucina dell’arte” is Italian but the pair of rather hapless restaurateurs we encounters are Belgium and their grasp of English is a bit tenuous but they can mime-like professionals.

Actually, only one of the restaurateurs is hapless, partly because his job description is a bit too broad. He is the handyman, waiter, wine waiter, sous chef, pizza chef, cleaner, musician and entertainer. The other, the owner attempts to keep order over his wayward helper and an erratic automatic piano accordion continually making allowances for the strange behaviour of his compatriot.

The plot – I think it could be called that, consists of a restaurant opening in the middle of a large tent, two members of the audience one female, one male are invited to have an evening meal. No, three people get invited but one woman is sent back to their seat while the other is subjected to a delightful harassment for most of the night.

The two chefs attempt to make pizza bases and they can spin them like professionals getting them bigger and bigger. However when they get too big, there can be disasters as many in the audience discover (Note: take a small plastic sheet).

The hapless one’s elaborate performances are a mixture of Charlie Chaplin and Mr Bean as he does some circus-style performances such as climbing into the chandelier to light each of the candles with matches or tries the multiple plate-spinning routine. Unlike most performances of this standard act, here he manages to smash a number of the plates.

Throughout the performance the two audience members sit in the midst of chaos, surrounded by clouds of flower, flying pizza, crashing plates. On opening night, the gentleman was required to take orders for pizza from audience members.

It’s an evening of pure entertainment watching two skilled clowns push themselves to the limits with edgy performances. We even gave a big round of applause when the hapless one managed to light one candle in the middle of the dark space.

Tune into NBR Radio’s Sunday Business with Andrew Patterson, launching this Sunday morning, for analysis and feature-length interviews.