ABSTRACT

With remarkable ease and efficiency, Baker delivers her speech, along with a cup of coffee or tea, to each member of her audience. A characteristic of her language, repeated over and over again throughout her performance, is the sense that she is speaking aloud an inner, private monologue. We are privy to her personal thoughts, and this privilege is double-edged: while on one level she plays a straightforward homemaker concerned with her day-to-day travail in the kitchen, on another level she ironically performs a certain kind of dutiful womanhood. Her delivery is disarming; we are caught up in the moment: teacup in hand, sipping and listening, we are guests in her home. It is only later, when I look at her programme, that I see that she distils this activity into a single action that she identifies as ‘Action No. 1 Stirring milk or sugar into a hot drink’. There is a ritualised quality to each of Baker’s thirteen actions. Each monologue – which articulates the action while she is doing it – is followed by what she calls a ‘mark’. For Baker, the mark is literally marking her body in some way so that she physically retains a ‘memory’ of the action throughout her performance. For example, Action No. 1 is followed by ‘Mark No. 1 To bandage my fingers into the right shape with Elastoplast’. She describes the bandaging of her hand in the shape required for stirring a cup of tea. The notion of some ideal hand shape for stirring tea gives Baker the opportunity to layer her performance with the inescapable issue of class so present in British culture. Her hand and fingers remain taped in this way during the entire performance and foreshadow that her body will become ‘bound’ by the tea ritual. The effect of this ritualised marking is that by the end of her performance Baker is covered with a variety of kitchen utensils and objects, in addition to being bandaged, smeared with margarine and partially soaked with water. She carries the burden of both

her performance and her kitchen with her. The kitchen space becomes a site for sharing, telling, demonstrating and enacting her fantasies of chaos and violence. The kitchen is the space where we serve our guests, but it is also a daily battlefield of onerous tasks and repetitive activity. In Baker’s playing space, the kitchen becomes a haven for just such detail in its provision of factual evidence: routines of daily life are examined, minutiae of domestic work are performed and social life is enacted. But interwoven into all this are hints of comic madness, a suggestion that chaos lurks just below the surface. In Action No. 3, for example, Baker describes her occasional need to vent her anger and then proceeds to demonstrate this by smashing a ripe pear against a cupboard door. Action No. 7 is a surreal juxtaposition opposing eating and cosmetics. Baker, snacking on small pieces of food that she calls ‘taste sensations’, describes how important it is to keep up her blood sugar level. She stages how her constant feeding and need for oral gratification in the kitchen have led to some embarrassing mistakes. For example, Baker ‘picked up what [she] thought was a crumb of cake only to discover that [she] was chewing on a small piece of masking tape!’ She then, seemingly incongruously, marks herself by putting on bright red lipstick and explains her action by linking it to a childhood experience.