La Cuisine, Festival Theatre, Edinburgh

Food for thought

The surprise for anyone who saw Peter Handke's play The hour we knew nothing of each other at the 1994 Edinburgh Festival is that his latest work La Cuisine contains words. Not many, but enough to occasionally involve the use of two simultaneous sets of surtitles and to add a piquancy to his more familiar wordless diorama of human activity and interaction. Co-written with Mladen Materic, La Cuisine is a highly choreographed event, however, and in this production by the excellent Théâtre Tattoo from Toulouse, Materic and Handke's sequence of elliptical social and emotional snapshots unfold into an uninterrupted, mimed pageant of life on a kind of timeless, nationless stage. Viewed from the perspective that the kitchen is the space in which the home's heart beats – and neatly overlooking the fact that more accidents happen here than in the bathroom, incidentally – this big, old-fashioned room, decidedly non-MFI with its cast iron stove, free-standing dresser, mechanical coffee-grinder and central table, is a hectic place to be.

Characters from different social backgrounds, of various ages, each with their own baggage, flit in and out of this generic kitchen sometimes using doors, sometimes hoisted offstage, sometimes slid off surreptitiously on a kind of escalator. Young and old go through their personal rituals of attempting breakfast, preparing meals, loving, laughing, weeping and arguing. Whiffs of freshly ground coffee and warm cinnamon tantalise the nostrils, a gigantic baguette hangs from the ceiling. It's the place to retreat to, to seek comfort and nurture in. But also, alarmingly, it's the cosy cocoon from which you leave for school, or don't return to from war, or from where you can be taken out and shockingly shot in cold blood.

Running all these threads together in one gathering-point the performers – actor-dancers with a gymnast thrown in – rely on gestures, glances and gesticulations to convey the rhythm and poetry of Handke's sometimes surreal, sometimes deliciously trivial scenarios. Memories of sex, birth and death simmer gently, seasoned with faded recollections of taking home school reports, bringing in the shopping, coping with the angst of family gatherings or celebrating the changing seasons.

In this ever-changing loop of kitchen lifecycles the 11 characters create a melancholy, magical and sometimes maddening kaleidoscope of human behaviour. Silent, spatial encounters and amusing near-misses crescendo into an operatic burst of poignancy when word of bereavement is brought to an elderly couple. They have no present for the young bearer of their bad news except the scarf from round his old neck and a couple of ripe apples from her table. The landscape is surprisingly broad but it needs to be to accommodate all the quirks and profundities of human behaviour that Materic, as director and set designer, has highlighted in Handke's concentration of dramatic metaphor.