Nanta (Cookin')

Nanta (Cookin')

25 June, 2009
by: John Ellingsworth

Un-hinged. Off the goddamn hook. Not my first Korean theatre export, but making JUMP look restrained and economic and just in all ways a model of sensitivity and nuance—even though JUMP is a show where characters regularly and with little cause run up vertical walls, backflip repeatedly, break out into slow-mo Matrix fight sequences, etcetera. In Cookin’ a little over an hour of relentless hyperactivity and sensory overload is spiced by the haunting terror of being pulled on stage for traumatic participation: I saw a show once where a member of the front rank audience was mime fellated, which I guess is worse than anything likely to happen at the Rose Kingston, but still spent nearly the whole of Cookin’ envisaging myself caught and wrecked in the storm of its thrashing energies.

The plot: three chefs have until six o’clock (six o’clock!, we are reminded, repeatedly, characters turning in unison to the giant illuminated clockface on the stage’s far right) to prepare a wedding feast under the occasional direction of a smarmed-back manager and with the unasked-for assistance of his favourite nephew. With disregard seemingly not just for the urgency of their task but for the plot itself, the cast distract themselves with food fights, romantic interests, the business of getting wedged arse-first in dustbins, a tiny amount of cooking / cookin’ (mostly discarded / thrown powerfully from the stage), and a great deal—and I mean a really very great deal—of kitchen implement percussion. The performers are excellent at drumming, unequivocally. I thought the drumming was of a high standard. Although perhaps… perhaps… there was a little… there might have been… a little too much of it? Yes, in the shattered aftermath I think I recall an approximate 30:70 drumming to not drumming ratio, the cast beating out rhythms with kitchen knives, saucepans, vegetables, cups—endlessly, endlessly.

It’s the sort of export show, made originally for tourists in Seoul, that identifies and exaggerates every racial stereotype. It is without mercy. The dial is set to 10. It has the attention span of a child and an equal amount of manic flighty energy, the performers putting all of themselves into everything from fighting with brooms to singing ad hoc harmonies to throwing plastic coloured ballpit balls out into the audience from barrels labelled SOY SAUCE—everything in fact except cleaning (the floor’s a mess) and cookin’. (During those moments when I was able to peel back my consciousness from the action on stage I contemplated what sort of cast turnover a show like this must have: presumably it causes breakdowns with roughly the same frequency as Neil Oram’s 22-hour play-from-hell, The Warp.)

There was a funny and exhausting mass participation section where the audience was divided into halves, by chance separating the normal people from the morons (I was a moron), the Idiot Half unable despite repeated explanations to grasp or coordinate a very simple call-response clapping exercise, the whole thing desperate and hysteric and probably complexly entwined with attitudes toward foreignness and broken communication. Going on for nearly fifteen minutes, it left the cast with just a couple to cook the wedding menu and discover the lost cream cake. A pitiless half dozen encores then combined with aggressive strobe effects and beams of intense white light to obliterate all opposition: the audience cheered.

Nanta is at the Rose Theatre until 27th June

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John Ellingsworth