Fully Committed

David Babani and Danielle Tarento founded the Chocolate Factory 10 years ago. In order to celebrate the 10th anniversary of this remarkable off West End venue, they’ve chosen to restage the play that first put the venue on the London theatre map: Becky Mode’s Fully Committed.

It’s an acidic, satirical oneman show about our obsession with restaurants, chefs and the triviality of celebrity culture. What shines forth is the virtuoso acting skills of Kevin Bishop. Not only is his performance a tour de force of comic acting, but as he hurtles through the fast-paced 70 minutes, playing some 40-odd characters (I lost count), you can’t help but be impressed by how he differentiates between the many characters through voice and gestures. He’s a wonderful, plastic clown, but this is also like watching someone juggle chainsaws, such is the speed of donning different personalities.

Bishop’s comic timing is impeccable and his imagination and creativity seem inexhaustible. He even manages to imbue the play’s downtrodden protagonist – ‘resting actor’ Sam Peliczowski, who is single-handedly manning the reservation line at Manhattan’s numero uno ‘global fusion’ restaurant – with charm and a sly intelligence, despite the rest of the play’s extremely larger-thanlife characters.

Director Mark Setlock’s input is crucial – not just in his sense of the vertiginous pace this piece demands – but in establishing the production’s New York ambience. Setlock was the American who acted in the original Chocolate Factory production in 2004 and helped Becky Mode create the original play, based as it is on their own experiences of being struggling and starving actors/writers working in exclusive restaurants. This gives the play an unmistakable ring of authenticity. Fully Committed, incidentally, is the pretentious euphemism that the celebrityobsessed restaurant decides to use to indicate that they are full.

Sam is desperately waiting for a call-back to the Lincoln Centre, for a part in a play he has auditioned for, but with his line manager Bob and another co-worker skiving, he finds himself manning the reservations switchboard all by himself, while he deals with slippery socialites, namedropping VIPs and PAs, cheery Mafioso, all desperate to get a reservation. Then there’s chef with a red hotline to the reservation room and a hectoring temperament to match. You’ll probably find a favourite character: I loved the stertorous, hysterical Mrs Sebag.

Sam eventually wins through against the odds, but morally speaking, it is a surprisingly ambivalent victory.

Until 15 November at the Menier Chocolate Factory, 53 Southwark Street, London SE1: 020-7378 1713, www.menierchocolatefactory.com