Drunken Baker

A Conceptual Design project at LAMDA

This is a conceptual design for the new play ‘Drunken Bakers’ by Barney Farmer and Dave Windass, staged in the Sainsbury Theatre at LAMDA.

Director: Joe Warwick

Set and costume design: Ania Levy

“Samuel Beckett meets Dario Fo at the gates of a hellish northern bakery that, like the bakers within, is in serious decline. Another day in the life of the decline of an independent bakery in a northern town, and the steeper decline of the independent bakers within. This nameless duo, played by Stephen Tompkinson and Alan Williams, drunk but deft in the craft of baking, are highly skilled imbibers of bargain booze.

Staggering towards their final act, these two grotesque and damaged characters are confronted by decline everywhere they turn. This, however, is a day on which both despair and hope come within touching distance. With the bakers isolated through intoxication from the outside world, hope and redemption comes in the form of Angel, a mystical young woman whose presence evokes the past, is rooted in the present and provides a path towards the future.”

In creating this performance, we were interested in capturing the dark, gritty atmosphere of a struggling bakery, through the eyes of the unreliable narrator of Slim. Themes of isolation, endless cycles, alcoholism and neglect for both himself and his enviroment took shape in a landscape of flour that fell and settled every day, burying with it lost possessions, memories and even the men themselves.

The brutal nature of the machinery: violence and danger in the metal industrial tools of the trade was paired with the soft, familiar qualities of flour and bread. This created an almost post-apocalyptic image, complete with an enourmous industrial oven billowing smoke as the bakers burn everything they touch.

Devised from Barney Farmer’s ‘Drunken Bakers’, a Viz comic, this absurdist staging tells the story of two men, trapped and alone in a world of their own creation, absolutely powerless to escape it.