After Sunday review, Bush Theatre – Fiery and intense, this is a pressure cooker of a debut

There’s a tendency in culinary writing to present food as a cure for all ills. It’s not just dinner – it’s a technicolour diaspora on a plate, a richly-scented trigger for buried memories, a healing salve for loneliness and social division. Sophia Griffin's perceptive debut play cuts through that sentimental perspective like a hot knife through butter. Transferring to Bush Theatre after premiering at Coventry’s Belgrade Theatre, it’s set in a Caribbean cookery class that’s designed as a kind of therapy for men in a secure psychiatric unit in Birmingham. They talk, they cook, they open up – but some problems are too big to be solved over a pan of softly sizzling onions.

Designer Claire Winfield turns the stage into an impressively bleak impression of an institutional kitchen, its cupboards labelled with patronising laminate signs. Therapist Naomi (a subtly vulnerable Aimée Powell) has high hopes she can make something of it, so she’s hung up African and Caribbean flags, and invited the unit’s Black men to come and cook together. But there’s nothing straightforward about that offer. They have to be cleared to use knives, to start. And then, after being escorted through the carefully evoked corridors beyond this room, and buzzed through its high security door, they have to exist together, which feels dangerous too.

David Webber is a winningly charismatic standout as the cooking club’s oldest member, Leroy. He has the audience in stitches when he cuts through Naomi's well-meaning speeches with tart observations like “mi not got time fi dis”. Still, charming though Leroy seems, he brings out the worst in the hilariously cocky but deeply insecure Ty (Corey Weekes), a younger guy who can barely stand to be in the same room as him. Is it envy, or something deeper? Meanwhile, Darrel Bailey delivers a nuanced performance as Daniel, a likeable father-of-two who tugs at everyone’s heartstrings in ways that slowly start to feel a little too deliberate.

Griffin is a confident writer who knowingly toys with and subverts her audience’s expectations of this seemingly simple story. Everyone talks admiringly about Neil, the elder statesman of the ward who grows Caribbean herbs in the garden and offers everyone paternal advice. He never appears. Naomi seems like the solid one, the one who’s got it together. But although her phone conversations between scenes initially offer a window into the ordinary family life these imprisoned men are missing out on, the picture soon darkens. No one’s mental health is cast iron solid.

With such careful writing, it’s clearly a deliberate choice not to go deeper into these men’s backstories, or to explain the events that had them committed to the ward. Director Corey Campbell’s staging makes some slightly clumsy attempts to fill in this missing, painful context: the stage rests on cardboard boxes of medical notes labelled with terms like bipolar disorder, and the men carve the air in overwrought movement sequences between scenes. We don’t really need these interventions. Instead of delving deep into trauma, Griffin’s strategy here is to show how these men’s violent pasts and troubled mental health are weaponised against them. If they open up, it can damage their case for release. If they close up, they’re resisting the system. If they start to care too much, it’ll break them.

For all the talk of cooking as an act of care, the way we treat food has an inherent violence to it: we cut it with sharp knives, simmer it until it boils over. Psychiatric institutions carry a similar contradiction: they both look after people and subject them to painful or restrictive processes to try to turn them into something else. This play is a pressure cooker, fiery and intense. It explores the healing potential of coming together to eat, but it can’t forget the brutality that went into this particular dish.

On at Bush theatre until 20 December; tickets here