A Place in the Sultan’s Kitchen (or How to Make the Perfect One-Pot Chicken Curry) – Q Theatre: March 12, 2026 (13th Floor Theatre Review)
A Place in the Sultan’s Kitchen starts with the personable Josh Hinton recounting his journey of discovery about himself, his culture, and his place in the world — and ends with a good feed of One-Pot Chicken Curry. Hard to complain really, unless you’re the one vegetarian in the audience who’d like just a little more meat in the show.
Josh’s show started in his hometown of Wollongong, where he was immersed in a multi-ethnic family well marinated in theatre. It makes its way here to a mainstage at Auckland’s Arts Festival after a quiet conquest of his native Australia. Combining music, memory and the aroma of his grandmother’s curry being prepared on stage as we learn about her life, it’s an inspired idea ably done.
The curry’s ingredients, made during the show, is a metaphor (we’re told) for his racial makeup: Persian, Sri Lankan, English, South African and Jewish. Lots of ingredients going into the melting pot.
He didn’t add to that list “Australian,” but perhaps he should have. Since it was in growing up in Australia that he discovered that his particular tint of brown made him just that bit too different for his Australian neighbours, and we learn that has helped define him; whereas in the Māngere in which I grew up (and this is the same for much of the rest of this fine city), this would have been part of the normal pattern of daily life.
Being an Australian however, which is where his show is first staged, one might have expected an acknowledgement of this land’s ancestors, or a nod to those of that country?
As a Gen Z (or millennial?) however — for whom, Googling tells me, talking about themselves “often acts as a form of self-validation” — he was allowed the ultimate privilege: to talk about himself all night. If one wanted to be harsh we might call his one-man show ‘theatre as therapy,’ or as sociological encounter.
But to say that would be too easy and too harsh. Because the show does make the hard look easy. In just 70 minutes, Josh tells us extraordinary stories of his immediate family that take us on 3,000 mile journeys by donkey, fleeing partition in post-war India, and climbing trees in London with Dizzy Gillespie.
He talks through the death of a loved one delivering understanding without a hint of cheap sentiment. (As a good Australian, he deflects here with humour.) And it all makes each of us, I think, want to reflect on our own family’s histories, and journeys, and the distances and voyages that might define each of us.
And this is all done with ingenious use of props, sound, projection, and mime using the utensils and ingredients used for cooking his curry, which bubbles away merrily as the stories are told. (Credit here to his brother Dominic Hinton, who joins Josh on stage to control the atmospherics.)
By far the strongest segment here was his meditation on grief. It would be wrong of me to usurp his delivery, so I won’t explain it. But that moment, which seemed heartfelt, linked show and stories and food together in a way that just worked. Worth it for that moment alone. Suffice to say that I wished the whole show had that intensity, or something near it.
In a smaller theatre we would have been graced with the growing aroma of that delicious curry, which unfortunately didn’t make it to our seats. But the richness of those stories and the texture of the telling gave the show a gentle aroma of its own.
THEATRE PETER
A Place in the Sultan’s Kitchen (or How to Make the Perfect One-Pot Chicken Curry), created by Josh Hinton, is on at Q Theatre until Sunday 15 March
A Merrigong Theatre Company production.This project was supported through the giving program by Carolyn Vincent · Ubuntu Foundation.
Image credits: Children of the Revolution
Tickets and more info here.
Trailer video here.
