MEM MORRISON,'Leftovers', Burton Taylor Theatre Oxford,
Tuesday 1st April 2008
Umpublished

Last week I was moved to tears by a piece of toast whilst enjoying the full English breakfast experience at dinner time ! This unexpected event happened during Leftovers, a solo work by performance artist Mem Morrison at Burton Taylor Theatre. Alternately amusing and very touching, Leftovers is an intimate performance about Morrison’s experience of growing up in a Muslim Turkish Cypriot family running the Sunderland Café in South East London. During a cosy hour Morrison mimics the preparation and serving of the greasy spoon café breakfast whilst taking the audience on an anecdotal journey through his childhood. Leftovers combines the conventions of a theatrical experience with the risks of performance art to convey the frustration and comedy of language barriers, cultural differences and inevitable confusions. Well observed remembrances and arch exchanges with the audience are underscored by recorded interviews with Turkish Cypriot café owners, stories of misspelt menus and Anglicised nicknames and always the repetitious clatter of cooking and serving food.

A stunningly handsome Morrison captivates with his wide-eyed monologues and aproned wheeling between imagined diners. Agitated telling of tales in English and Turkish, traditional music and dancing and slapstick goings on with white bread and table-laying reveal the tensions within a childhood filled with food, love and the angry longing to belong. “I don’t want your food I want your dreams” he raged as he told of how he wanted to be as blonde as in the blue-eyed illustration of family idyll on an old biscuit tin.

It is a significant observation that our identity is part-shaped by what we eat and with whom we eat and Morrison more than most has had to confront what Englishness can and cannot be over the dining table. Achingly moving at moments, despite our sympathy for the evident pain within his experience, as a non Turkish audience we could only ever be left on the outside looking in on this particular meal.

Too much indulging of props meant that the piece was a tad longer than it needed to be. This is not perhaps surprising as the autobiographic is quite the hardest work to edit and sterner direction would have helped. Nonetheless this well written and impeccably acted performance is an enjoyable and poignant act of homage to the courage of the immigrant attempting to settle in a new land. It is a touring piece and if you get the chance do take it in – just remember to take a hanky !

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