Sunday 13 April 2008

last night's curry

Theatre, as one playwright put it very simply to me, is about relationships. True. But these relationships are often now far more complex and varied than the ones traditionally represented on stage.

The Guardian review of Fred Pearce's Confessions of an Eco Sinner: Travels to Find Where My Stuff Comes From shows there's a story of relationships, for instance, in last night's curry:

'[Fred] Pearce likes eating curry. "I have often wondered"' he says, "where the prawns in my Saturday night curry come from, but I have never got a straight answer." It turns out they come from a part of Bangladesh near the Bay of Bengal. So he goes there, and finds a whole area that has been devastated by prawns. Or rather, by our appetite for prawns. The old landscape of small farms and mangrove swamps has been replaced by a vast monoculture of prawn farms. As Pearce points out, this is bad for wildlife - tigers, he says, are being replaced by tiger prawns.'

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