Writer: Chen Xu
Director: Tara Jamora Oppen
Celebrity chefs already have a touch of the bizarre about them: all wide eyes, emphatic gestures and reverent talk of ingredients. In A Perfect Dish, that absurdity is pushed one step further, as a TV chef, preparing to cook crab live on air, begins to hear it talk back.
Written by Chen Xu and directed by Tara Jamora Oppen, this half-hour dark comedy, presented as part of Peckham Fringe, is slight by design but far from flimsy. Its premise is simple, but it has a sharp comic unease, a cookery show that seems to have wandered into Kafka.
Kyu Sim is the real strength as the newly famous chef, all exaggerated grins, gestures and televisual excess. He captures the strain beneath the performance: the frantic resets between ad breaks, the mounting panic, and the guilt beginning to break through his public persona. In lesser hands, the role could easily descend into contrived parody. Sim instead finds a persuasive rhythm between showmanlike bravado and private collapse. As the piece intensifies, beads of sweat trickle across Sim’s facade, and the sense of a man trapped in a hot studio kitchen, plagued by conscience, becomes unexpectedly convincing.
The crab, meanwhile, is realised through puppetry. The puppet itself is limited in its range of expression, which sometimes makes the exchanges feel repetitive, but this seems to owe more to design than to the performer operating it. A touch more vocal variety would help, and the attempts at slapstick do not always land, though the creature remains both comic and oddly affecting. The production is at its strongest when the crab is treated not simply as a joke, but as a genuine character whose presence steadily chips away at the chef’s certainty.
The production wisely avoids overstaying its welcome. The exchanges between chef and crab escalate towards a conclusion that is funny, grotesque and genuinely unsettling. Bathed in red light, the final image has a nasty little sting.
There is refinement still to be done. Some of the dialogue could be tightened, and the emotional argument might yet be pushed further, particularly in the final stretch. But for a new work by young theatre-makers, A Perfect Dish already has more conviction and clarity than many fringe experiments. Most importantly, it has a premise that lingers. With tightening, one could imagine it sustaining a longer run in a larger venue.
Runs until 5 June 2026
Peckham Fringe runs until 5 June 2026
