Metta likes...Fruit

We're very healthy here at Metta HQ - we even have a vegetable patch outside our office (currently growing potatoes, courgettes, leeks, lettuces, tomatoes, broccolli, broad beans and peppers...and possibly some carrots though I'll have to check that with Will). But we've also gone mad on fruit lately because Sexing the Cherry (as the name suggests) is bursting at the seams with cherries, bananas, apples, peaches and even an occasional pineapple!

Sexing The Cherry is full of fruit!

Fruit is a good thing. It tastes great and it makes great theatre...
well it's always interesting watching actors eat on stage, I think, and there'll be a fair bit of that in STC, and our brilliant stage manager Jules Richardson has got us a fruit sponsor in the form of New Spitalfields Market who are providing us with all our fructic (is that a word?) needs. So the pineapples are on us! We even put a pineapple as the raffle prize at the recent Curious Eye Theatre launch party which we were supporting.

We're also using some of the fruit to create a moment of object manipulation/puppetry in the show - and without wanting to give the game away it involves a rather sweet (no pun intended) and rather sad moment with a pineapple, some bananas and two cherries. And a violin case.

Also fruit has become a sort of strange bargaining chip - as well as offering people a piece of free fruit if they booked tickets for STC on the weekend we first went on sale - I've also just taken to carrying excess fruit around in my bag to offer around like a health conscious Easter Bunny. We were at Jacksons Lane on Monday rehearsing the aerial choreography for the show and we thought we might not be able to do any aerial work after all because of a rooms cock-up, but then the lovely theatre technician Duncan let us go on stage and even rigged all our aerial equipment for us. So I showed my appreciation & gratitude with clementines.

As the great Jeanette Winterson said oranges are not the only fruit, not by a long shot.