Oral Fixation

When Steve Rodgers takes the call he's in the midst of a very small window of time off, “I've got this week to garden, do my tax, I've got to put a new door on, and watch the World Cup.”

The premier season of Eight Gigabytes Of Hardcore Pornography, in which he plays a porn-addicted IT security worker, has just finished at Griffin's SBW Stables, and before jetting off to Perth for its run at the State Theatre, he'll have a week to whip Food, which he wrote and co-directed with Force Majeure's Kate Champion, back into shape and get Mel King (replacing Kate Box from the initial production) up to speed.

Food looks at a truck stop tuck shop where two sisters run a takeaway joint, and the manifestation of their desires brought to the fore by the arrival of an exotic traveller.

“I think that's where food and sex and porn and addictions all cross over – what is pleasure? and happiness? and contentment?”

Following a successful 2012 premier at Belvoir the show is hitting the road for an extensive tour, taking it to the infinite anywheres in which it could be based – Lismore, Wagga Wagga, Moonee Ponds… “I'm so proud that Food will get around to so many places outside the main cities,” Rodgers, who grew up in Launceston, beams. “I think it's very important because it's a play set in a big country town anywhere, and how people in regional centres in some ways have to create lives for themselves”

In Eight Gigabytes Of Pornography it was sex and pornography and debt; in Food it's sex and food. Then there was sex and dance when he tore up carpet in Dance Better At Parties, last year at Sydney Theatre Company. Rodgers laughs at the suggestion his recent work could warrant the 'Sex and…' man title. “In some ways they're all to do with connections and how people can find a place that they can settle and be content with. Dance Better At Parties was a study in grief and the man is basically teaching himself to live again; Eight Gigabytes the man is probably too far gone to live again in some senses, but that's a study in how you kill pleasure; and Food I think is, like Dance Better, redemptive; it's about how you recreate a life when life feels like it has dried up for you.

“There's a line in Food that Nancy says – 'I want, I want, I want, but I don't know what my heart wants' – and I think that's where food and sex and porn and addictions all cross over – what is pleasure? and happiness? and contentment? Like everyone I spend a lot of my life thinking about sex and food, and they're both really beautiful things, but potentially dangerous.

“All my life I've been on a rollercoaster with my own weight and eating habits, so in a way it was a way for me to explore my own obsession with sticking things in my mouth.”