Review by Anna Atkinson
Breadtime for Hungry Souls
Bexhill Music Festival
24th June 2023
Breadtime Stories for Hungry Souls was a new storytelling show from the wonderful Sharon Elizabeth premiered at the Bexhill music festival. Here’s my little review:
We walked into the rose gardens. The scent hit us 5 seconds ahead of the colours. The door of the barn flung open with such enchanting welcome to reveal strings of fairy lights, folk music pouring out and a large bread bin and a beautiful wooden harp sat centre stage. Sharon introduced her starters… essentially her Grandmothers and the ways they offered her stability and substance beyond parents. Something I related to with my own Nan. A memory of the way my Nan hugged me popped into my head. Sturdy. Grounding. Wholesome. When she hugged me I used to feel a little more planted in the earth, tiny seedling or little golden swaying corn sheath that I was. That was it. My Nan helped me see the gold. The gold within the ordinary bread and butter aspects of life. Sharon then sang us into the mythic underworld led by Demeter’s grief that she conjured with two notes on the harp that formed a cloak of grief around the enraptured audience. Audiences hummed. Pomegranate seeds and breadcrumbs took us to Hades and most enjoyably the fertility goddess Baubo. Sharon’s cockney mistress of raised skirts and stunning vocal range bringing the seasons back into alignment and helping Demeter refined her gallows humour. The message was really that of how love can always be found at the bottom of a bread bin. Warmth, cheer, raised skirts, ritual and rebellious bakers. We learnt about peasant baking with dew drops, on ascension day, the fall and rise of sourdough’s lockdown renaissance and the wonderful silent clown interpretation of a man’s quest to farm intuitively with love and respect for land above profit. I cried during the song about the lost windmills of London. During lockdown there was a drift back to baking bread and sharing with neighbours but it’s been all too easy to plunge back from zoom squares into the supermarkets easy offerings of ‘Kleenex bread’ a term coined by the late great Julia Child. Storytelling and singing, like bread, is wholesome. Sharon inherited her grandmother’s bread bin and an extraordinary passion for baking. The proof was in the pudding and we all broke her (unbelievably good) bread and drank wine after the show like it was the last supper. There would not be a more glorious last supper than this. The scent of fresh bread and roses on a balmy mid-summer evening. The gods were with us and Persephone returned eating all her crusts. Hades is as far as we are aware still gluten- free.
The Gossamer Threads Project 