The Feast – Antony Sher

Felix runs a large, run-down theatre in the heart of Africa. Returning home after a drying-out cure, he finds he is sober, but the world seems drunk. The dictator, Duma, has been deposed, and people are indulging their newfound freedom in every possible way. Master of ceremonies of the tiny expat community is Charlie, a handsome and wealthy doctor whose famous parties are modelled on ritual. As Felix sets out to help the actress-singer Kaz track down the killer of her son – a victim of Duma’s regime – he travels through a feverish and mutable society where beauty and terror live side by side, where both man and beast are embarked on feeding frenzies of gratification, where the barriers between past and present keep shifting, and where, at any moment, the Great Dictator himself threatens to reappear. THE FEAST explores the conflict between appetite and imagination in the human spirit, viewed against an epic, surreal portrait of Africa, and of Theatre. Graphic, violent and funny it is a quite brilliant study of purity versus decadence.