Core Supermarket
@ the Powerhouse, Nottingham 11.2.99

(review © Jon Horne 1999)

A warm sports hall, empty except for a television, a camcorder and two small piles of sand with a barefooted woman walking stiff-backed between them carrying a grain of sand at a time. This is Rachel Gomme's "Longshore Drift". The performance lasts four hours and that's it really, except for an audience that is me crouching in a corner, fidgeting at first, and then hypnotised.

The show moves on to the theatre upstairs, now full of chortling art students. A plummy little twerp calling himself PleeSKLApuss does a turn that probably went down a storm after lights-out in the third-year boys' dorm at a minor public school, and then a whining white South African rants for half an hour about how he was, like, you know, oppressed by apartheid too. While I'm searching for something to throw at the stage and everyone else is applauding noisily, Rachel Gomme sits serenely at the back of the theatre, the only artist in the building.

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