Singapore — Picture this. You’re digging into your seared New Zealand King Salmon with potato gratin, asparagus and salsa verde. Your date is relishing a dish of veal cheek, with a side of horseradish potato mash, sauteed asparagus and a burgundy reduction. And all around you, there’s hissing, there’s laughter — because you’re also watching a comedy play called The Woman Who Cooked Her Husband.

Or this: You’re in The Esplanade’s Theatre Studio and you’re enveloped in the smell of Indian spices. It’s actress Rani Moorthy’s one-woman show Curry Tales, and at some point, she’s cooking some dishes and offering some lucky audience members a serving or two. Yum.

ALL ABOUT THE EXPERIENCE

In both theatre productions, food and culinary elements play a key role in immersing audiences-slash-diners (or lucky nibblers) into the unfolding drama before them.

In a sense, it’s not much different — albeit in a reverse sort of way — from dining in pitch black darkness or putting on headphones to listen to lapping waves and seagulls while digging into Heston Blumenthal’s The Sounds Of The Sea dish. Or, if you want to stretch things a bit, witnessing Gordon Ramsey channeling an even more deranged Iago in Hell’s Kitchen.

Nitpick all you want about what to call these (A theatrical event with culinary pretensions?) but one thing’s for sure. It’s all about pushing for The Experience — wherever or whatever it is.

“I think the setting is very important to the dining experience. At a beachside restaurant serving seafood, with the sand on your feet and the wind in your hair in Jimbaran Bay can be as magical as eating fish at the old fishing port building of Noma,” shared Wild Rocket’s Chef Willin Low, who incidentally just returned from a meal at the award-winning restaurant in Copehagen.

Heather Barrie of Fine Palate cafe, whose open kitchen dining space will be the site of The Woman Who Cooked Her Husband and who will provide the three-course meal to go with it, agreed: “Ambiance is quite important, the comfort level, enough space for everyone, noise levels — whether (diners) enjoy the evening will depend a lot on behind the scene things happening.”

Both may be talking about conventional dining experiences, but it could very well be employed in a show.

Curry Tales features the stories of six cooks and while Moorthy insists that it’s more “theatre with a bit of cooking in it … I wanted to also share the food with the audience as an organic extension to sharing these characters and stories. The smell and sound and sensorial experience of the story gets atomised in the food.”

NEVER THE TWAIN

SHALL MEET?

Of course, there are those who still see these two aspects — dining and watching — as a clash of sorts. Mostly due to the concept of dinner theatres, which doesn’t go down too well with some. Past attempts tended to sell one or the other short, said Don Mendoza, Today’s resident food expert. “I’d enjoy getting kinky with whipped cream as much as the next bloke, but I prefer to keep my dinner entertainment to either a pre-prandial or post-banquet affair. If there’s a comedy act or acrobatics involved — imagine choking on your food at some ill-timed comic gag,” he quipped.

Or even the idea of eating in the movies. “I appreciate the slightly surreal experience of tasting what I see on screen,” he said, “But I draw the line at some guy feasting on his chilli dog while I’m trying to savour Meryl Streep’s larger than life portrayal of Julia Child.”

One theatre actress who declined to be named thinks all that eating is a distraction. “It’s no different from someone messaging during a performance — it’s just weird and rude. It’s the same for people who perform for dinner and dance. Nobody listens, it’s awful.”

For the food peeps, it’s the other way around, of course.

“While dinner theatre is important in enhancing the overall dining experience, it should take a secondary role to the overall quality and flavour of the food being served,” shared Julien Royer, Chef de Cuisine at Jaan. “Delicious dishes make for regular guests and far better dinner memories than mediocre food that is theatrically presented.”

Chef Low puts it succinctly, quipping: “To be honest, dinner already is theatre to me, I don’t need any more competition from another performance!”

But this perceived great divide hasn’t always been the case — as experiences, they’re historically linked.

“The roots of theatre are very much connected with food,” said Rayann Condy, who’s directing The Woman Who Cooked Her Husband. One can go back to Shakespeare’s time where the Globe Theatre was essentially the Elizabethans’ version of The Cathay, where instead of popcorn, they had shellfish, wine, ale, and lots of meat roasting on spits at the venue.

The Asian tradition of outdoor theatre, too, ignores the divide. Moorthy recounted: “My earliest memory as a child was in Sentul market in Kuala Lumpur in the ’60s watching an open air Chinese opera. The audience will wander off to buy some pisang goreng or a bowl of noodles and not miss a beat of the artistic presentation.

A GIMMICK THAT WORKS?

It’s probably this idea that you’re simultaneously doing two separate things at once that doesn’t quite sit well with some professionals in their respective fields. But then again, why not treat it as a singular experience?

To do that, everything has to be seamless, which is something Condy, her cast, and, of course, the folks at Fine Palate are working on prior to the show opening next week.

“We’ve been trying to balance how we weave the food experience into the show. The food is an art on its own and it needs space for people to enjoy it. It’s a whole evening where it flows from food into the play and there’re overlaps between the food and the presentation,” she said. (According to Barrie, the dishes are a selection from the cafe’s standard dinner menu that begins with a shared entree.)

Whether or not it’s a gimmick, the food and theatre folks we talked to agree that at the end of the day, it’s really all about whether or not it brings something to, well, the table.

“It could be taken as a gimmick,” admitted Barrie, “(but) if it’s rich in context and content, then I think people will take from it what they want. If they’re interested they’ll come.” And indeed, the show is already sold out and Condy and the Fine Palate folks are thinking of doing more in the future.

This, Mendoza thinks, is perhaps linked to our insatiable obsession for grub, that manifests itself in everything from cyber food porn (thanks Instagram and Facebook) to deftly styled cooking shows, to actual film festivals dedicated to cinematic food mantras. The 2009 edition of the Food Film Festival in Brooklyn, for example, had a 10-course mushroom-inspired tasting menu by Iron Chef Brad Farmerie that followed the screening of a documentary on mushrooms.

The bottomline, however, would seem to be rather obvious — if it works, great. Which is exactly how it was for Chef Low and his one-time Blumenthal experience at the Fat Duck.

“I felt a little silly wearing headphones that came out of the seashell, but that dish turned out to be the most memorable of my meal there. Gimmick or not, it served its purpose for I remember it very vividly.”

Curry Tales runs from June 13 to 16, 8pm, Esplanade Theatre Studio. With a 3pm Saturday matinee. Tickets at S$25 from Sistic.