Tivoli Cinema screens ‘The Kitchen’ tomorrow night
- Mark Brenner, National Theatre
- All of the drama and theatrics of a real restaurant kitchen are captured in the Arnold Wesker play, The Kitchen.
Jerry Harrington, the owner of Tivoli Cinemas in Westport, was so bowled over by the National Theatre of London’s filmed production of the The Kitchen — which he broadcast last Sunday afternoon and will show again tomorrow night at 7 p.m. — that he sent out an e-mail raving about the production to his friends and followers last week.
“I was knocked out not only with the sheer theatrical virtuosity displayed on stage,” Harrington wrote, “but by the cinematic sensitivity that I was seeing and hearing.”
The Wesker play was first performed in England in 1959. But it so effectively captures the heightened tension and distinct personalities of the “back of a house” in a busy restaurant that it’s perfectly relevant and spot-on today. The broadcast of the theater performance, which was filmed at a live performance in the Olivier Theater last month, begins, metaphorically anyway, as a ballet and ends as an opera. You know, like a real restaurant kitchen.
