1. Scents, cuisine and politics.

Suggesting that the operations which transform a human animal into a social being is similar to the nutritional process, the recently deceased British playwright Edward Bond famously declared: ‘The subject of drama is society; society in people, not people in society.’1 Whether in socializing a newborn or in nourishing its physical body, the operation similarly consists in making it ingest external vital elements that it will eventually metabolise to turn them into its ‘own’ self. Indeed, the social metaphor inherent in the act of eating can be found in a number of pieces by political playwrights – ‘political’ in the primary sense of the term, that is to say, playwrights who question the relationship between the individual and the City.2

It so happens that, for the past twenty years, shows featuring culinary episodes have multiplied on Western stages. Not all of them are political – far from it! – but cooking on stage no longer seems incongruous these days, and many playwrights or directors are seizing on this possibility. The olfactory dimension of such shows is a fact, since there can hardly be any cooking without smells. If we also take into account the experimental odourised works that seem to be appearing more frequently,3 we can see that audiences are increasingly exposed to scents and that smelling is therefore in the process of establishing itself as an additional modality of theatre reception, alongside the traditional channels of sight and hearing.

This article takes these two observations as its starting point. It explores the use of scent as a theatrical ingredient in its own right, one that political playwrights may employ to convey meaningful elements that contribute to the overall discourse of their works, and the conditions that make such use possible. Building on my previous studies on nutritional presences in the theatre, I shall particularly examine two cases where scent is endowed with a degree of autonomy sufficient for it to be used to deliberately manipulate the audience’s experience, and I shall conclude with a plea to reassess the extraordinary semiotic power of scent.4

2. Redundancy or autonomous signifying power?

In plays that do not try to convince anyone of anything, in plays that do not need to convey the urgency of a message (as is the case with political theatre), scent is often present in a redundant manner. For the most part, it is used merely to reinforce the local colour or to set the mood. In The Senses in Performance, Professor Sally Banes identifies six uses of scent in the theatre, five of which are redundant:

1. to illustrate words, characters, places and actions;

2. to evoke a mood or an ambience;

3. to complement or contrast with aural/visual signs;

4. to summon specific memories;

5. to frame the performance as ritual.5

I will give here only two examples that intersect several of these categories.

Une mariée à Dijon,6 for example, revisits a moment of miraculous happiness during a dinner at an inn. The staging replicates the diegetic situation7 by seating the audience at restaurant tables arranged in a circle around the actress who delivers her lines to the various tables in turn, whilst a meal is served to them. The aromas of the dishes arriving at the spectators’ tables echo those evoked in the text, just as their spatial situation echoes that of the character. They are, so to speak, put in her place. At the intersection of uses 1, 2, 3 and 4 of Banes’ taxonomy, scent is here a ‘index’8 in the Peircean sense of the term: it is the tangible effect emanating from a causal source – the dishes brought to the audience – and it is this superimposition of the spectatorial situation onto the diegetic situation that produces the immersive effect.

More commonly, scent is often used simply to illustrate the play’s subject matter. Thus, Salé, sucré, sacré9 presents an overview of the main food-related rituals in the three monotheistic religions, an overview of which the narrator offers a metonymic sample through the preparation of a fragrant chorba, a traditional Ramadan soup. Falling within Banes’ five categories mentioned above, scent here serves as a generalised example of what is being said on stage. It is at once an index, an icon (evoking the idea of a dish being cooked) and a symbol (that of food rituals in monotheistic religions). The act of cooking and the resulting scent fit perfectly with the play’s theme. They require no particular effort of interpretation from the audience. On the contrary, they draw the audience into a form of unquestioning engagement with the performance.

In such plays, scent simply serves to reiterate through the olfactory channel information that was given at first glance. Its role is redundant to what is being performed; it acts as a flavour enhancer, adding a pleasant touch to the diegesis. This type of performance is eminently respectable – and often very entertaining! – but the perverse consequence of such a use of scent is to render it inert from a semiotic point of view. Its autonomy and signifying power are neutralised. It signifies nothing more than what is said or shown. Any possibility of allowing it to autonomously enrich or problematise the subject matter is removed.

Pleonastic or not, the use of scent on stage has received little theoretical attention from playwrights, directors or researchers. The bibliography compiled by Professor Charles Spence in Scent in the Context of Live Performance (2021) covers virtually every aspect of the subject (historical, technical and semiotic) and has since been supplemented only by a few chapters and articles in more general works.10 This paradoxical lack of theory, despite the phenomenon’s growing prominence, seems to confirm that olfaction remains a blind spot in the theatre. It is not the most overlooked aspect of it,11 but it is as though playwrights hesitate to embrace it fully and grant it genuine status as a dramaturgical constituent. Most of the time, they rely on pragmatics to construct olfactory effects, eliminating those that ‘don’t work’ to retain those that do ‘work’, without really defining what ‘working’ means. Whilst the aim is always to trigger an emotional reaction, the nature of this response is never truly determined beforehand, and we often remain at the surface level of the verb ‘to move’.

Can scent do more than simply reiterate what is already being presented on stage? Under what circumstances might it provide additional information? Is it capable of bringing on its own weight to the overall semiotic economy of a performance? It seems to me that it is, at least in two scenarios that are particularly evident in the food-related instances of political theatre as defined above, and which I shall outline in the following lines.

3. Attestation of diegetic truth.

The first kind of information that scent can convey autonomously on a theatre stage is a statement that strikes me as fundamental: that of the primacy of diegetic reality over that of the audience. Scent has the power to tell the spectator: ‘This (the diegesis, what is happening on stage) is the true reality; yours is the artificial one.’ But to do so, it must operate by forced entry.

This can be seen in George Tabori’s play Mein Kampf (Farce),12 which exposes, in a farcical way, how Hitler came to power thanks to the blindness of ordinary citizens who fail to grasp the danger he poses. In Act II, Hitler returns to see Schlomo, Gretchen and their pet hen, Mitzi, to retrieve his diary, which he had left behind at their home. As Shlomo tarries in returning it, Hitler’s henchmen force him to hurry by seizing Mitzi (the hen) and beating her savagely, with their backs to the audience. Then one of them turns towards the auditorium, with ‘Mitzi, strangled and plucked, dangling from his hands’ (Tabori, 1993, p. 6713) Finally, whilst they subject Gretchen to the same treatment, Mitzi’s remains are thrown into a large frying pan full of fat, which spreads the sound, and above all the smell of her cooking, throughout the auditorium, amongst the spectators. This action delivers a significant shock to the audience, shattering their perception of the play. Indeed, the classic Brechtian distancing employed up to that point had given them a false sense of control. Insofar as the Nazi persecutions took place in their own space-time (the ‘real’ one), they could afford to appreciate the way Tabori recounts them on stage without feeling truly affected. But when the reality of Mitzi’s flesh being cremated reaches them directly through the smell, all distance is abolished and they find themselves part of what is happening on stage. The fictional world of the performance suddenly reveals itself to them as the primary space-time (the ‘real’ one), and the spectators find themselves caught up in it against their will. When the diegetic reality invades their inner space through olfactory intrusion, their emotional response is beyond their control. In this instance, the smell of burning flesh triggers feelings of panic and anxiety, intensified tenfold by the sound of cremation and the actual presence of fire. The fumes of roasting flesh transport us directly to the midst of the cremated victims of the Second World War. As George Tabori lost his father in a concentration camp, his commitment to warning against the dangers of totalitarianism, and his consequential choice of the most impactful narrative techniques possible are easily understandable.

Another example where olfactory intrusion asserts the primacy of the diegetic reality over that of the viewer can be found in Roméo Castellucci’s Sul concetto di volto nel figlio di Dio (2011). This example lies outside the context of food, but the use of scent is the same. In a bourgeois apartment, an elderly sick man, naked beneath a dressing gown due to the care his body requires, lives with his son, a working executive. When the son returns from a day’s work, the father is seized by recurrent bouts of diarrhoea. The son cleans his father’s soiled clothes, the floor and, above all, his father’s bottom — once, twice, three times, ten times — until he breaks down emotionally, to the point of doubting the love he feels for him. The scenography, far removed from realism — since the hyper-stylised flat is dominated by a gigantic reproduction of Antonello da Messina’s Saviour of the World (Christ’s impassive face) — gives the audience, once again, a false sense of security: they believe they are about to witness an allegorical spectacle, one which, by its very nature, is detached from their reality – the one they perceive as ‘real’. Even though what takes place is very hard to watch – a man physically deteriorating as he approaches death, while another fails to keep him alive with dignity and reaches the limits of his capacity for love – it is, after all, ‘only theatre’. Ah, but here’s the thing: the stench of diarrhoea is very real, and as soon as it hits the viewers, they instantly become part of the drama that is being played out on the stage.14 From the moment scent penetrates them through the nose, it becomes impossible for them to get out: since it emanates from the stage, the scent seems to prove its existential reality, and the limits of the son's humanity become those of the audience as well.

This olfactory intrusion, this abduction of the spectator to bring him to the heart of what is being played out on the stage relies on two characteristics shared by affects and the scent that triggers them. In the first place, affects move faster than thought. They are not slowed down by the meanderings of conceptualisation, just as a scent travels directly to the limbic brain without passing through the cognitive zone. This characteristic makes it possible to take the spectator by surprise. The sudden arrival of scent within their field of perception triggers emotional reactions in them against their will, reactions that bring the playwright’s narrative to life within their own experience. Consequently, they find themselves forcibly placed on the stage, and a participant in the events unfolding there. For this reason, it is essential that the scent appears unexpectedly and against an anosmic background – or at least, a theatrically anosmic one. If other scents are produced on stage prior to this moment, the dramatic effect falls flat, as the entire olfactory production will have been identified as diegetic, and therefore separated from the spectator’s world.

In the second place, sensations such as scents cannot stand up to contradiction since they are sensory in nature. To produce a scent (and the sensation that accompanies it) is to affirm its reality. For the viewers, the scent is ‘real’ – and even ‘true’ – since it exists, since it reaches them, since they perceive it. Its reality negates the artificiality of its diegetic origin and replaces it. Moreover, as art critic Sandra Barré points out in L’Odeur de l’art, since the scent fades away as the odorous molecules disappear, the very fact of smelling constitutes a material experience of the passing of time, therefore a material experience of the present, and thus of the reality in which the ‘here and now’ is anchored and which it attests to. (Barré, 2021, pp. 134–146)

Finally, this use of scent also has the advantage of being portable. Indeed, what the audience takes away with them into their own world at the end of the performance is not the heaviness of a mass of knowledge arranged didactically through a chain of reasoning. It is simply the memory of an impression. As philosopher Chantal Jaquet puts it in her Philosophie de l’odorat: ‘In reality, memory … is what remains of the olfactory impression once the scent has dissipated.’ (Jaquet, 2010, p. 427) Playwright Rodrigo Garcia, who often stages nutritional scenarios to bear witness to the devastation of the world by our industrial society, emphasises, for example, the importance of the ‘smell of rot’ in his performances. He equates this smell with our world and hopes that the audience will carry it away with them after the performance so that, perhaps, they might feel the urge to change this ‘rotten’ world.15 He, too, uses olfactory intrusion to engage the audience in his performances. However, unlike the examples we have just mentioned, he does not introduce it in a jarring manner. In any case, his non-narrative style of writing would not allow for such a dramatic twist. On the contrary, in his plays, scent takes shape gradually, cumulatively, as a series of actions involving fresh food unfold. The background remains odourless,16 but the excesses unfolding on stage are such that the scent, ultimately, is merely one element among many, standing out no more prominently than the rest. Its appearance is not experienced as a turning point. It is only at the end of the performances, after food has been spilled, shredded, crushed, mixed, cooked, and sometimes burned, that the audience notices the olfactory presence of what has taken place on stage. Only after the performance are they struck by the realisation that what took place was ‘real’—real because what they smell is the real scent of real food that has really been ravaged. They find themselves broken into by the performance, conned by it, which forced them to take part in it without their realising it, and which sends them back into the real world burdened with the responsibility of that participation.

Whether abrupt or subtle, the olfactory intrusion in the theatre demonstrates that scent reveals the primacy of diegetic over spectatorial reality in the audience’s consciousness. To quote Violaine de Carné, the leading contemporary playwright exploring the olfactory dimension of performances, ‘smell does not represent; it is. It seizes the audience in the power of the here and now. Its diffusion interrupts the principle of representation through the irruption of a sudden reality.’ (Jaquet, 2025, p. 269) When politically charged during a performance, scent is therefore capable of serving as a highly effective dramaturgical tool, and of being used as a means to undermine our tendency not to feel genuinely concerned by what is being represented.

4. Scent problematized.

To assert the primacy of one reality (diegetic) over another (spectatorial) is to shift the viewer from one frame of reference to another. For this shift to occur, as we have seen, these two frames must be kept separate until the moment when one is absorbed by the other. In other words, the scene must not have been marked by an odorous background. Indeed, the semiotic behaviour of the scent will differ if it is identified from the outset as part of the scenic reality, as we shall now see.

The second instance identified where scent can bring a unique dimension to a performance no longer involves a qualitative approach – that of shifting the audience from one existential plane to another – but rather a quantitative one: that of enriching an existential framework shared by both the stage and the audience. This occurs either when the scent is already present as the spectators take their seat, thereby signalling an entry into the performance in medias res, or when it is generated in full view, deliberately, so that it does not take the spectator by surprise. In both cases, it is immediately identified as a dramaturgical element forming part of the diegetic universe. But it is also identified as conjunctive, that is to say as bridging the gap between the reality of the stage and the reality of the audience. By texturizing the gap between the stage and the auditorium, scent is capable of enriching the latter by providing various forms of information, whether subjective (such as an authorial commentary) or factual and objective. But to do so, it cannot work alone: it needs to rely on other dramaturgical elements. As scent designer Laurence Fanuel puts it: ‘Faced with a scent, the spectators do not know how to process this immaterial information. They want to anchor it to some form of stand.’ (Hahn, 2016, p. 48) It is as though, through these desired stands, the scent princeps, generated on the spot, has the power to capture elements of information belonging to the spectator’s reality, infusing them into the performance’s creative process, before projecting them back to the audience, imbued with additional meaning.

A clear example can be found in Hermanos.17 The play begins with two brothers making themselves a cup of coffee – which they find bitter – in their grandfather’s kitchen, which they have come to clear out following his death. The audience shares, if not the taste, at least the aroma of this coffee, just as they share the story of the grandfather, a Spanish anarchist, which the two brothers recreate using food ingredients, notably sugar cubes – brown sugar for the ‘reds’, white sugar for the ‘whites’ – to represent the great battles of the Spanish Civil War. At the end, after reliving their grandfather’s journey, they make themselves a second cup of coffee – this time sweetening it with a cube of brown sugar. The audience, once again, shares the aroma of the beverage, but this time it has been enriched by everything the play has taught them, and which is summed up in the play’s final line: ‘Indeed. It does change the taste.’ In theatrical occurrences of food, taste and scent are synonymous.18 For the audience sitting in the auditorium, the ‘taste’ of the coffee, which has changed between the beginning and the end of the play, is its aroma. But since sugar, whether brown or white, has no smell, the final line is necessary to manifest this enrichment.

Another, more recent example can be found in Eva Doumbia’s latest work, Autophagies, which exposes the colonial scar left on food products from the far corners of the globe that we consume at home without a second thought. When the auditorium doors open, a maffé is already simmering on stage. These two spaces are already united by this aroma, whose origin is undoubtedly diegetic. The entire performance will thereafter consist in problematising this dish’s aroma, then its taste, when the audience are invited to come and share it at the end. This problematisation will take place by providing information about the various ingredients that go into its composition (sweet potato, peanut oil, pepper, sugar, peanuts, rice, tomato, etc.). Doumbia announces this right from the start: ‘In this ceremony, we are going to make the connection between what we eat, history and geopolitics.’ And indeed, the audience is provided with knowledge about how these distant ingredients were produced, processed, transported, advertised, sold and consumed here, in their own country. What is illuminating for our discussion is that this information becomes embedded in the scent of the maffé and enriches it through distinct dramaturgical elements – in this case, art forms engaging the three remaining sensory channels. Thus, books on the geopolitics of food are handed out to the audience. They have, in practical terms, only time to hold them in their hands, not to read them, but the mere act of touching them already conveys the weight of the subject. Sight and hearing, as well as rhythmic perception, are then engaged by videos, dances, chants and poems through which information is conveyed about the history and labour of those who produce palm oil, pepper, sugar cane, peanuts, rice, bananas, cocoa, etc. Doumbia thus constructs a complex multimodal narrative, providing dates, sales volumes, wage rates, the number of slaves on slave ships, the names of the countries driving the industrial distribution of these products,19 the names of emblematic companies or brands,20 accounts of personal experiences, and so on. All this information enriches the scent of the maffé that permeates the performance, as well as the audience’s understanding. Ultimately, the audience will no longer be able to perceive this scent as a wholly artificial dramaturgical element, since its historical, economic and human depth — rooted in the spectator’s own reality — will have been revealed to us through the interplay with these other dramaturgical elements.

I have noticed that this use of scent is particularly prevalent in theatrical works addressing issues of cultural identity, as is the case in the two examples cited above. It is particularly evident in the plays of several playwrights from migrant backgrounds, who wish to correct the social view of their community of origin. Thus, Fellag and Sara Jehane Hédef produce shows in which they cook North African dishes, whose ingredients serve as the basis for a performance that is acted, sung or filmed. Full of poetry, it nevertheless provides the factual knowledge in which their demand for recognition is rooted. As Fellag puts it, “To love someone, you have to know them.” (Fellag, 2003, p. 10) The aroma of his couscous or that of Hédef’s meatballs,21 reaching the audience in the auditorium, is therefore enriched by what the playwrights teach them through the ingredients they use one after the other.

We see that in cases where scent is used to convey specific information, it needs to collaborate with one or more other dramatic elements. This element is often the spoken word, but Eva Doumbia shows us that many others are capable of playing this role. Such a collaboration is necessary because it is difficult, scenically, to bring variations to a scent that would alter a meaning or value initially assigned to it. To my knowledge, the only example of this approach would be found in Shaun Lynch’s Clean Smell Opera (198022), where cleaning products (washing-up liquid, detergent, shampoo, shower gel, etc.) – which produce a pleasant ‘clean’ scent – are used to excess, so as to make this ‘clean’ scent nauseating, and to align this reaction with the commentary the play offers on the soppy entertainment that soap opera23 is. Unfortunately, this play has never been revived, and I cannot provide a first-hand account of it. Be that as it may, we can see that in each of these examples, the scent, combined with other dramatic elements, renders present an authorial discourse that it conveys to the very heart of the spectator’s experience through the nose.

5. A still underused operational power.

Whether it brutally intrudes upon the spectators’ existential reality or enriches their knowledge and lived experience through its combination with other dramatic elements, one cannot help but recognise the immense vehicular power and operative force of scent in the theatre – or, to borrow Dominique Paquet’s term, its ‘perfumative’ force ” (Paquet, 2004, p. 161). It certainly seems that a barely explored field of research is beginning to emerge here. This is evidenced, for example, by the recent doctoral thesis of Lou Sompairac, studying the olfactory phenomenon through the lens of phenomenology to arrive at the concept of ‘olf-action’, which defines olfaction not as a passively experienced operation, but as ‘the active and operative grasping of a reality’. (Sompairac, 2021, p. 26) Through its physical yet materially subtle nature, and its ability to provoke affects and bring ideas to life, scent can bring together – or even merge – the diegetic and spectatorial worlds. When well-conceived, this intimate connection can facilitate (or even, at times, compel!) the audience’s energetic and imaginative engagement with a performance. Scent has the power to transport the spectator to the heart of the stage and, when that stage is political, to place them in a position to experience a reality different from that which the filter of their culture imposes on them in daily life. Scent in the theatre has more than the power to decentre the gaze: it has the power to decentre the feeling of experience.

Some companies working on olfactory theatre:

Compagnie Le tir et la lyre < https://www.tiretlalyre.com/>

Miss Bouillon Company< https://miss-bouillon.com/>

Compagnie Pauline Dumailhttps://paulinedumail.com/