Seven Hungers

Seven Hungers

Platform, Glasgow

Mary Brennan

Even before the show begins, we are talking food. The cast, in chatty welcome mode, are asking members of the audience if they have had something to eat, if so, what? It is not meant to be a naming and shaming exercise, where guilty or unhealthy snacking will be held up to scorn or reproach. Food is, more or less, the first thing we think of when the word "hunger" comes into play and it is the first course in the new touring production from Company Of Wolves.

The cast - three women, two men - sit at a long table and murmur the names of stuff that makes them salivate. The humble chip gets the biggest chuckle of agreement from the audience. The title is, however, Seven Hungers. What are the others? By degrees of association the company translate one appetite into another, so that food becomes emblematic of other needs, some physical, others emotional or spiritual.

The through-line that takes us from primal states - the urge to survive, the infant's desperate dependence on its mother inside (and out) of the womb - to the sustaining intimacy of close, loving relationships is, however, less than satisfying.

Different aspects, akin to evolutionary stages, are delivered in morsels of mime or physical tusslings that rely on protracted repetition of uninspired movement. These frankly look half-baked when set alongside the thrilling vocal complexity of the sound-scape.

Company director and co-founder, Ewan Downie, has worked with the award-winning Polish ensemble, Song Of The Goat, so too has musical director Anna Porubcansky: it shows - or rather it sings. There is no translation or notes on the traditional songs from Circassia, Chechnya and Ukraine but there is no need for either.

Our ears and our hearts can grasp the longing, the loss and, yes, the hunger - be it for homeland, for family, or for a sweetheart left behind - that rises from the throats of the performers.

Where the movement lacked expressive depths, the music more than compensated with a richness and intensity that left you hungering for more of it.