Cooking with Elvis
Cooking with Elvis is dark comedy by playwright Lee Hall which was first performed in 2000 in Edinburgh.
The farce was adapted from a play the author wrote for the award winning BBC Radio God's Country series and premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in 2000, where it was highly acclaimed. Shortly afterwards it was transferred to the Whitehall Theatre in London's West End in a production starring the comedian Frank Skinner.
The comedy centers on Dad, a famous impersonator of rock 'n' roll star Elvis Presley, who was paralyzed in a car crash and is now forced to spend the rest of his life in a wheel chair. Other characters include his anorexic, alcoholic wife Mam, their fourteen-year-old daughter Jill, and their young lover Stuart.
Climaxes of the play are surreal fantasy scenes in which Dad's hallucinatory Elvis dreams are bursting into popular Elvis songs as a reminiscence of his one-time persona of Elvis impersonator. At one time, Dad, already dressed in his Elvis costume, leaps from his wheelchair and launches into an Elvis ballad. At other times a wardrobe door will be opened for Elvis to leap out and into another song with Mam and Jill as backup singers. In another scene Singing Elvis becomes Reverend Elvis who starts making bizarre speeches about philosophy, drugs and sodomites - references to Presley's consumption of drugs and, according to reviewer Rich See, the gay rumors that continue to swirl around Presley, namely, his "obsession with James Dean and his alleged affair with actor Nick Adams." The glittering costumes in the play are fun and remind the viewer of the costumes worn by the Las Vegas Elvis in the 1970s. For example, there are ornate belts with gold padlocks and lots of spangles.
Mam has an insatiable appetite for sex which can no longer be satisfied by her husband. Jill is primarily interested in cookery books. Mam is locked in a battle with her daughter, who disapproves of the fact that her mother has a very indiscreet sexual liaison with Stuart, a handsome young baker, in the marital home. Mam's sexual need is echoed in Jill’s appetite for food which leads to overweight. Brought home by Mam, Stuart soon figures in everyone's sex life, including the brain damaged "Elvis" who seems to have at least one part of his anatomy functioning. After some trouble, the ending of the play is a deadly one.
Cooking with Elvis has been compared to the early black farces of Joe Orton.