Cooking With Puccini

Think food and opera composers and it's Rossini who leaps to mind.

However, Puccini's appearance on an afternoon cookery and chat TV show soon reveals that he can easily handle Tuscan bean soup, freshly shot rabbit and whore's spaghetti.

This last also connects with the other thing he's famous for, apart from composing, and hostess Lynsey is soon taking on the personae of the many women in his highly active life.

The first surprise is that the dapper elderly gentleman who strides in from the wings speaks in such a broadly North Country accent, but then he is a robust northerner from Tuscany after all. So this isn't a polite tour through the arcane world of Italian opera, although we do get to learn some very interesting musical facts.

Did you know, for instance, that the reason for some unusual early harmonies was that the organ on which they were composed was missing some pipes - they'd been nicked by Puccini and his brother to sell for cigarettes?

Or that the reason many of his compositions feature high and low notes with nothing in between was because they were the ones he could reach with a servant girl across the middle of the keyboard?

This must be the only show in Edinburgh where you get to smell food, join in an operatic chorus, ogle naughty postcards from Paris and get quizzed on your knowledge of Italian opera - purely so that the composer can check that he is remembered while others are forgotten.

It's certainly the only show with a live action silent film version of Tosca and a simultaneous combination of Milanese soup and Turandot, complete with a corkscrew singing Nessun Dorma.

Jeffrey Mayhew (who also wrote the piece) is Puccini to the life, and his broad Giacomo the lad act is a pleasure to watch. Lynsey Tash is a good foil, she sings well and puts across the female point of view with splendid directness. If you know nothing of Puccini when you go in, you'll have learned plenty by the time you come out. You'll have been thoroughly entertained, too.

Guy Masterson's direction keeps it all lively, the cooking is slickly done and there's some great music. It's almost as good as a trip to Italy.