Review – The Kitchen: Sizzle and spice and all things rice

Grand Opera House, Belfast

★★★

Plumes of steam rise and curl from two huge cooking pots onstage, tended to by an Indian couple who seem to regard their duty as they do each other – glumly. Roysten Abel's performance may begin with a sizzle, as a husband and wife, played by Mandakini Goswami and Dilip Shankar, pour rice into hot oil to make a sweet South Indian delicacy, payasam, but it does not pursue the obvious drama of a cookery show. Instead, it is a more appetising display of ritual, accompanied by 12 mizhavu drummers who rise up behind the action in three tiers, urging the ceremony along with intricate assistance on resonant copper drums.

The striking spectacle of their platform recalls The Manganiyar Seduction, Can & Abel's previous Irish visit, which steadily revealed 36 Indian folk musicians in ebullient performance. Here, the shape of the stage is more pointedly considered: a curved drum that corresponds with the contours of the instrument and resembles the urn shapes of the couple's cooking vessels. Like the recipe itself, each part contributes towards a unified whole.

There are echoes of the divine in the idea: payasam is sometimes translated as “ambrosia”, a dessert reserved in Abel’s native Kerala for celebrations and festivals. Goswami and Shankar prepare it with ceremonial skill and human struggle, but seem as fascinated and unsure as if this was a tentative first experiment. In synchronous movements, they empty glass bowls of milk into the vats, extracting every last molecule, then peer deep into the results, stirring with the effort of galley slaves, slumping and rising over the heat.

Cooking is a capacious metaphor: wherever there is a plan and a challenge, intense labour and a risk of disaster, simmering tension, crescendo and release, you can detect any human act: love, devotion, life. Abel is ambiguous about context – the only frame is the task and the roiling beat, and the couple become subordinate to it.

The drummers are more fastidiously scored and attentively illuminated, every flutter of fingers held in a beam of light. The rhythm rarely corresponds with the action, energised when they are enervated, which can accentuate the restlessness of a watched-pot display. But the show peaks – in passion, scent and spectacle – to resolve into an occasion; a mass sharing of the payasam. It may be more diverting than riveting, but that gathering contains its own elegant performance, the proof in its pudding.