A recorded version of David Shrigley, David Fennessy and Nicholas Bone’s unique stage production Pass The Spoon will be shown at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket on Wednesday 18 December, its first cinema-style screening since its digital release more than a decade ago. Tickets for the screening are on sale now. 

Described by Shrigley as a ‘sort-of opera about cookery’, Pass The Spoon enjoyed sell-out shows when it was first staged at Tramway, the Traverse and the Southbank Centre in 2011 and 2012. The film version was shot during its run at Southbank Centre as one of a series of live streamed events in the build up to the London Olympics, and was available for one year. 

This premiere of sorts will mark a reintroduction of Shrigley, Fennessy and Bone’s quirky story about TV chefs June Spoon, Philip Fork and a manic-depressive egg as they prepare a disastrous meal for a giant puppet called Mr Granules. With the madcap pacing of a panto, it’s ripe for a Christmastime revival. 

Nicholas Bone, director and co-creator of the opera, said, ‘Pass the Spoon is one of the productions that people still talk to me about, even though it’s 12 years since we last did it. They quote lines from it, they sing bits of it; someone even told me once that their whole family would sing the “Soup” song in the car. 

‘It was the biggest production Magnetic North had ever done; there were 18 people on stage and it was a crazily big thing for a tiny company to take on. When we performed it at the Southbank Centre in London, we played to more people in two nights than we would usually do on a whole tour with one of our other shows.

‘I can’t wait to see it on a big screen with a live audience and see how people react to it again. It’s set in a television studio as a live cookery show is being made, so there’s a role for the audience. Before the first night we weren’t sure whether the audience would get this; the first line is an off-stage announcer saying “Will you welcome to the stage your host, Mrs June Spoon!” and we hoped that people might applaud as she stepped onto the stage. We’d asked the onstage musicians to do some feeble clapping just in case nothing happened, and then at least there’d be a joke about it. What happened on the first night was that Pauline Knowles stepped through the door and the whole audience clapped and cheered, and then we knew that the whole thing was going to work. Pauline was a wonderful actor and a beautiful singer, but people were astonished when they saw her as June Spoon and it really changed the perception of her as a performer. Sadly, she died very suddenly in 2019 and it will be very emotional for everyone involved to see her performing June again. 

‘The idea for the show came from Dave Fennessy and me sitting in a café talking about who we’d like to work with. Dave said “David Shrigley”, and I said “That’s funny, I was thinking the same thing.” We knew he was interested in music, and that words were a really important part of his drawings. We managed to get hold of him and it turned out he’d just heard one of Dave’s pieces performed at a music festival and liked it. David had the idea of it being a TV cookery show and wrote a mammoth script, which we then worked together to edit down. Putting it together was an exhausting and difficult process because there were so many elements to it, but the end result was so popular it felt worth it. It’s wonderful to be able to introduce it to a new audience and I can’t wait to see how they react.’

The screening will be followed by a question and answer session with the creative team, with Shrigley joining remotely.

We interviewed Bone at the time of the opera’s live run and he told us, ‘In the rehearsal room on day one, the critical question was “does it work?” There was lots of laughter (some of it slightly nervous, as actors grappled with quite complex contemporary music, rapidly changing time signatures and sequences where they have to sound out of tune). The astonished laugh from those in the room who were hearing the piece for the first time at the moment when June Spoon meets her large, smelly nemesis […] was a hint at how it could work if we can pull it off.’ Read the full interview here. 

Pass The Spoon, Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, Wednesday 18 December.