We often forget that we are absolutely bombarded by food. In metaphor, in magazines or television advertisements, whether or not you watch The Great British Bake Off, proudly or in secret, you can’t quite get away from it. The towering form of Gordon Ramsay and his frequent slurs. We relish Nigella and her appetite for sinful chocolate cakes. We spend hours (apparently) watching restaurants crumble to pieces at the sheer stress and exhaustion of the service industry. How theatre has got away with not satirising or dramatising it for the past couple of years is a complete mystery. But what with the recent success of the Royal Court’s revival of Chicken Soup with Barley it seems as if the London theatre-going public is falling in love with Arnold Wesker all over again.

Written over forty years ago The Kitchen has been performed in thirty or more countries, including as a musical. The National Theatre has combined our two great loves with a kitchen sink drama set in a hot sweaty kitchen. It’s a rather simple plot: we witness the lunch and dinner service of a 1950s restaurant in London, a melting pot (see what I did there?) of nationalities, personalities and ideologies. Director Bijan Sheibani has a clear interpretation of Wesker’s text, using the actors’ bodies as a way of communicating time as they often stop and start whilst circling the majestic Olivier Stage. Pots and pans are clanged about, dishes are broken. Sheibani really tries hard to replicate a real kitchen. Apart from a few aesthetic details, however, it falls a bit short.

Giles Cadle’s set resembles a 1950s diner sure enough but the staff run, nay, sprint from hot plate to hot plate (and having worked in numerous restaurants over my student years I can genuinely vouch for the implausibility and serious health and safety issues whether or not it’s the 1950s!). Anyway, what interested me most were the depictions of the various nationalities; of course Wesker completely boils down his stereotypes until they resemble nothing but accents-on-a-stick. The strongest performance of the night came from Tom Brooke, who plays Peter the German “dreamer”, whose desperate plea carries Wesker’s great message: money is bad, capitalism is bad. Sound familiar?

Unfortunately, the weakest performances come from the female waitresses – their tarty stock portrayals are ignorant ones. As per usual they hold no agency, shame on you Mr. Wesker. They walk on, they bark orders and they walk off. There is a rather poignantly written and anguished scene involving Brooke’s lover, yet it is not powerful enough to tug at one’s heartstrings – quite the opposite in fact, it was awkward and almost banal. The actors all obviously take the most pleasure out of their choreographed sequences: we see Greek dances, flamenco guitar and German folk songs. In the opening to Act Two a kitchen porter proclaims,  “It’s like a united nations in here.” If only this performance was a united one.

The Kitchen is playing at The National Theatre until 9th November. For more information and tickets, see the website here.