One Star Review of Zack's Vegetarian Curry
‘Zack’s Vegetarian Curry’, created and delivered by Zack, is an interactive one-man performance piece, which, though aesthetically pleasing to one who is fully colour-blind, leaves a sour taste in the mouth. The location is the airy kitchen of an Edinburgh flat; the audience are seated around a dining room table; the curry reaches the middle; everything goes wrong. Though there is potential for improvement, the universe is only finite, and so it is fairly unlikely.
The piece does not suffer from a lack of progression over the course of the evening; indeed, its direction is interminably downhill. The setting itself is promising – a table; chairs; cutlery; there are even plates. Unfortunately, this is the performance’s zenith, after which there is a slow descent through Dante’s nine circles of hell: repetitive; sparse; cold; tasteless; uninspiring; unfunny; repetitive; potentially poisonous; repetitive. And this is just to speak of the multitudinous, tiny, refrigerated, edible, beige, novelty, multitudinous, sulphur-stained, multitudinous napkins. As for the food, I felt like Oliver Twist eating dinner at the workhouse, except I couldn’t bear to ask for any more. Between each mouthful, an adjacent audience member was heard to whisper under her breath, apparently in a trance, the closing lines of T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’: “This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper”.
It would be possible to salvage an atom of hope from the piece, if only the acting had been up to scratch, but, alas, Zack wasn’t convincing anyone. The gnarled facial expression, the clunky dialogue, and the unceasing tears into the salad bowl amounted to an overall sense that he was enjoying his wares even less than us. And this observation should not be taken lightly: as I myself stared mournfully into the seething vessel of unremitting gastroenteritis, I saw all my broken dreams, and, whilst Prufrock is said to have measured out his life in coffee spoons, I began to measure out mine in soggy clumps of sweet potato.
If anything the ending of the performance was the highlight, inasmuch as the performance ended. Borderline sacrilegious, with an acrimonious start, a sorrowful middle, and a tumultuous finale, ‘Zack’s Vegetarian Curry’ is boldly uninspiring, hopefully all just one massive joke which no-one has told me about yet, and – perhaps worst of all for a curry – relentlessly unseasoned. To negate the famous closing words of James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’: “no I said no I won’t no”.
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Xavier Greenwood studies Classics at Balliol College, Oxford, and was nuts enough to go for a run up to Arthur's Seat, thereby claiming a place as the healthiest of the Week One reviewers.
