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Finding your tongue as cook and playwright: the case of Ryk Hattingh’s Eensnaar

Although food has become an object of study in various disciplines, the use of victuals in live theatre is still a neglected field. South African and New Zealand playwright Ryk Hattingh’s homage to poet, doctor and Cape cookery expert C. Louis Leipoldt, a one-man play entitled Eensnaar, was staged by director Mark Graham as a cooking session providing a sensorial response to considerations of cultural and linguistic identity. The play centres round a recipe for beef tongue and the culinary implications of preparing traditional dishes outside their country of origin. The dish also exemplifies the expatriate author’s sense of loss of language and a sense of community. The play contains minimal stage directions and no invitation to cook on stage, but Graham’s olfactory emphasis is evocative of Leipoldt’s parallel career as a writer on food under the nom de plume K.A.R. Bonade (carbonnade or char-grilled meat). Leipoldt was instrumental in forging the Afrikaans language, as illustrated by various quotes from his best-known poems. Hattingh’s play contains a number of intertextual references in English and quotations from Moriori incantations translated into Afrikaans. Starting with its title, Eensnaar, this multilingual play written in a minority language and consisting largely of quotations from anthologies and traditional recipe books, might just be untranslatable, a homage not to a poet, but to a language, an intimate letter from playwright to public.