Tag: recipe

Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples

 A Place in Sultan’s Kitchen (or How to Make the Perfect One Pot Chicken Curry)

By Joshua Hinton (and Dominic Hinton)

Auckland Arts Festival

Rangatira, Q Theatre

Until March 15

Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples

Making a one-pot chicken curry is so easy. The recipe is really straight forward. Slice up some onions, some potato, some chicken and a bunch of spices. It’s not that hard. It’s the chicken curry recipe Joshua Hinton’s nan, “MehMeh” made him for years and he is going to make it for us.

He is good at making it. He stands at his little cooking bench. Chopping and sprinkling and pouring. And just like in those TV cooking shows you also get to see shots of him doing all his chopping and mixing from above.

It feels as though Josh has invited you into his kitchen to have a personal chat as he reminisces, letting you into his cooking secrets and tales of his family.

He starts telling stories about his relatives and their journeys last century. From Iran to India to Australia, the family caught up in the British invasion of Iran in 1941 and then the Bombay Fire of 1944, when a British freighter loaded with explosives destroyed part of the Bombay Docks and the city.

These are some of the mixed-up tales his nan has told him, about her early life. They are a bit like the lives and the cultural mix of hundreds of immigrants. They are a mix of Persian (Iranian), Indian, Sri Lankin, Zoroastrian, English, South African, Bahia and Jewish.

The cooking becomes something of a metaphor for his life and his people before him, a mixture of memories, events and family tales.  The cooking and the recipes are his cultural history, binding memories.

While Joshau makes his chicken curry, his brother Dominic controls the lights, sounds and special effects as well as doing “MehMeh” s voice. Dominic also makes an appearance at the end of the show playing his guitar as the two of them sing a song about their family.

The show is a gentle exploration of a refugee family’s life, the various threads finally knotted together with the two brothers lives living in Australia. There are big, events, various wars, family movements, obvious and insidious racism but more joy than sadness, as Josh reflects on his family’s life.

Josh’s life as person of mixed heritage living in Wollongong has its surprises, being the only brown person in the school photograph and its gives rise to variations on the old trope about “where are you actually from”.

And then at the end there’s a meal of chicken curry in the Q Theatre foyer.