Tom Marshman, Everybody's Kitchen

Review in Issue 20-1 | Spring 2008

Tom Marshman serves himself up on a bed of cutlery. This is the beginning of a generous ritual of sharing in which Marshman oscillates between dinner party host and priest of the table.

There is a fulsome ambiguity to Marshman’s presence: educator in the finer points of the digestive system, immersed sensual consumer, and our representative as he swallows ‘the prawn that poisons you’ – an act which is the gateway of the performance, the gear change to something modestly mythic. In the row in front of me, younger members of the audience were shivering with the giggles: testimony that they had been lured into uncertain sweet and sour space.

Tit bits are paraded; poignancy, regret and allergy are cooked up. The opportunity for the knickerbocker glory is gone now. We are nibbling in the ‘salad bar of broken dreams’. Crushed Nice biscuits are transformed into a desert of disappointment. Marshman waits, the lonely shaman, for his microwave to ping, and then ends with a glorious conjuring of the twin pillars of wisdom as he makes two columns of flour rise to theatre roof, with whisk and kettle; a fabulous climax to an accessible and hospitable ritual.

Presenting Artists
Presenting Venue
Date Seen
  1. Nov 2007

This article in the magazine

Issue 20-1
p. 35