The finest ingredients

Actor Gavin Mitchell has already donned a foam-based egg costume for his turn as Mr Egg. This provoked much debate about whether or not the foam egg should have holes for arms.

As for Mr Granules, the size and shape of what the 2m-high puppet operated by Tobias Wilson will look like is everything. In spirit, at least, one imagines him resembling the gluttonous Mr Creosote from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.

Earlier, Pauline Knowles and Stewart Cairns as June Spoon and Philip Fork prepared their culinary delights in camera-friendly showbiz style.

Opera singer Peter van Hulle flits between them as a Butcher, while repetiteur Michael Bawtree plays composer David Fennessy’s score, which is set to be embellished by a 10-piece version of The Red Note Ensemble. The nonsense that follows looks to Come Dine With Me and Ready, Steady Cook by way of The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party from Alice in Wonderland if co-opted to take part in It’s A Knockout. In short, then, Pass The Spoon is as ridiculously overblown as any other opera, sort-of or otherwise.

“There’s a whole process of trying to find the strange world it takes place in,” says Bone over a healthy-looking and mercifully immobile lunch. “It’s a very Shrigley-esque idea of a TV studio it’s set in, and a lot of the last two and a half weeks of rehearsals has been to make sense of these characters in their lack of sense. We also have to balance that up with what’s in David’s head, because he has quite a clear idea of what they’re like. So it’s been quite a strange thing, trying to make David’s two-dimensional drawings into three-dimensional characters.”

This is the complete reverse of something like Disney’s stage rendering of their animated feature film, Beauty and the Beast. In the live show’s multi-million-pound franchise, actors are effectively recreating their pen and ink big-screen forbears in a hi-tech affair with little opportunity for any real onstage creativity. Anyone expecting Pass the Spoon to be some flesh and blood re-creation of Shrigley’s drawings, then, should think again.

“Creatively, I was interested in writing the dialogue,” Shrigley says, “but visually it’s not really based on my classic style. If it was an animated film, then obviously it would be, but with real people that’s not the case, and there wouldn’t be any reason for that to happen. It’s set in a TV kitchen, so it needs to look like one, albeit one with a small chamber orchestra and people dressed as foodstuffs in it.”

Pass The Spoon was born after Bone and Fennessy were asked to put in a proposal for one of Scottish Opera’s Five:15 series of 15-minute works. Fennessy suggested Shrigley as a collaborator after recognising something in his drawings that he felt lent itself to music. The Five:15 idea went elsewhere, allowing Shrigley’s initial scraps of dialogue to be developed into what he calls “a long, rambling script about a TV programme”. A first draft set over the five courses of a meal was the result. Enabled by a Creative Scotland Vital Spark Award, Pass The Spoon has since developed into Magnetic North’s biggest production to date.

It also marks the latest high-profile work featuring a hybrid of artforms, something which has become increasingly prevalent over the last few years.

“It’s interesting how someone from a different artform looks at things differently,” Bone observes. “What’s really interesting about David is that he works very instinctively. He’s very back brain.”

“I suppose it’s always going to be a bit crazy, because opera is crazy,” Shrigley says, as if to illustrate Bone’s point. “It had to be set somewhere, and I guess I just figured you needed to acknowledge that the actors were in front of an audience. A format I was familiar with was a TV programme, and a cookery programme lends itself to a narrative because there’s a recipe. I guess a recipe’s a list of things to do, and I like lists, so that made sense to me, but I dunno. The fact that most of it’s fun makes it really daft, anyway, and it meant I could do whatever I wanted to.”

For all its daftness, Pass The Spoon is a musically complex affair.

“I like Dave’s music,” Shrigley says. “If someone else had asked me to do something with music I wasn’t really into, then I probably wouldn’t have done it.”

Composer Fennessy’s work has previously appeared at the likes of Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, who co-commissioned his organ-based Big Lung project with Stirling’s Le Weekend festival, which was first performed at the Church of the Holy Rude. Fennessy also wrote The Adding Machine, a short opera performed by The Paragon Ensemble which featured a libretto by playwright Tom McGrath, who if he were still alive would undoubtedly approve of such musical and dramatic audacity as that contained in Pass The Spoon.

The presence of The Red Note Ensemble, the contemporary classical ensemble led by composer John Harris, is also significant. Red Note recently performed Philip Glass’ science-fiction opera, 1000 Airplanes on the Roof, and Brian Eno’s Music For Airports at the recent Minimal festival. All of which squares with Shrigley’s notion that “If this work’s written about it might be written about in [left-field music magazine] The Wire, and that’s very much the kind of credence that I would need to be impressed by anybody.”

Beyond its short Tramway run, Pass The Spoon will get a one-off airing on the South Bank to accompany a major Shrigley exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 2012. Shrigley can’t foresee himself exploring opera any further. “I know nothing about opera, composition or written-down music,” he says. “I’m just quite excited by the unfamiliarity of it all.”

Pass The Spoon, Tramway, Glasgow, November 17th-19th

www.tramway.org