This year is certainly the year of food on stage. We've had baskets of nuts in Liola at the National and eggs, lots of eggs in the Cripple of Inishmaan at the Noel Coward to name just two but Roots at the Donmar beats them both.

There are three acts, two set in kitchens and the third in a front room which give a list of produce worthy of a weekly shop. We have a tea of liver and mash, flour, eggs, butter and sugar being made in cake batter, potato peeling, runner bean stringing and a table laid for high tea complete with victoria sponge and the biggest trifle I've ever seen.

Then there is the lamp lighting, the washing up and drawing water to heat in the copper for a bath - tin of course, this is 1950's Norfolk. Roots is in some senses a picture of rural domesticity. A farming community where Beatie (Jessica Raine) has returned from London ahead of introducing her boyfriend, a socialist, to her family.

The problem is that the domestic chores play too big a part in filling the action of the play. The primary theme of the play that is about thinking and living and whether you need one to do the other. Beatie is attracted to Ronnie's intellect and can recite whole tranches of what he says but is this thinking?

She reminded me a little of Pip in Dickens' Great Expectations, she's been introduced to a different world which makes her a bit ashamed of the one she comes from. But unlike Pip who turns his back, Beatie wants to change her family.