Alice Snedden takes a behind-the-scenes look at Silo Theatre’s cheeky and triumphant newest work, BREAK BREAD, in a roundtable with Sophie Roberts, Alice Canton, Freya Finch and Leon Wadham.

This coming Tuesday, 30 November, BREADK BREAD will be broadcast to audiences. The theatre work has had a baking process spanning years, lockdowns and multiple crises. In this roundtable discussion, writer, actress and comedian Alice Snedden asks Silo Artistic Director Sophie Roberts and makers Alice Canton, Freya Finch and Leon Wadham how they continued to ‘make bread’, and in doing so gets to the sourdough bug of their provocation – practice – and, of course, Zoom etiquette in making this ambitious and anticipated production.

→ You can watch the video recording of the roundtable, click here, or read the transcribed written version below.

Alice Snedden: Welcome everybody to the Break Bread roundtable. Thank you for being here, not at my behest but at the behest of Silo Theatre and The Pantograph Punch. I'm Alice Snedden and I’m the host...

Leon, is it true that this show has been in the making for a lifetime – or, more accurately, two years? Leon Wadham: Sophie came to us at the end of 2019 with Silo. The plan was to do a big community show at the end of 2020, where everyone got together in the same space and shared stories, made food together, maybe fed each other across the table. Quite shortly afterwards, we went into a global pandemic. And the concept of kneading dough with a stranger and putting your fingers in their mouth didn't quite make sense in the new context.

Over the last two years, we've been sort of wrestling with the new world we're in, but with the same desire for community. And the product we've ended up with, I think, has the intention of the first idea that Sophie came to us with, but in a completely new form. Alice Snedden: Was it quite hard to maintain it? Like I find any artistic and creative project to be so fulfilling at the end, but utterly tiresome and really hard work during the process to maintain motivation and the initial spark. How do you sustain that spark over two years of a show being pushed and changed? Freya Finch: I think it’s helped that the show and the world around us had changed so much. We've had to be in constant response to that. There are probably 40 versions of the show we could have done. Right? Although we're the same or a similar team, and we've worked on this thing through time, it's like we've made several different shows that have similar threads that have carried through. It's been such an evolution. That's helped keep it fresh.

→ To continue reading this feature at The Pantograph Punch, or to watch the Roundtable Interviw, click here