A small terraced house in an undistinguished road in East London. Four of us wait outside and when the moment comes we open the door, enter, and are transported to another universe, a world perfumed with the odours of memory: crystallised violet creams, rich tea fingers, cheap aftershave, cigarette smoke and red-hot chillies.
In the rose-strewn, chocolate-box littered living room, a woman of nervous neediness takes us through a palette of perfume and memory. In the kitchen a pork chop is cooked, tequila downed and popcorn popped; upstairs in the bedroom the stuffy smell of sickness and whisky mingles with the vanilla essence of cheap biscuits.
Helen Paris's and Leslie Hill's performance piece aims to explore the elusive connections between smell and memory and is being performed in ordinary homes across the globe. It would strike me that it is not truly site-specific because the stories told are clearly the same whether they are in Brazil or West Bromich or Hackney. Yet Paris and Hill are onto something deeply aromatic here. Despite having a heavy cold that should have disqualified me from covering this performance, I still found the way it demonstrated how aroma is so redolent of memory affecting. It is a different enough theatrical experience to be worth the journey.
The kitchen episode is the most central and the most effective, partly because it is the best written and confidently performed, partly because it offers the widest range of sensory experience, and largely because it succeeds in transforming the personal into the universal and political as the smell of griddled pork chop becomes the burning flash of the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then, the ordinariness of the domestic setting is transcended and transformed into something quite extraordinary. Well worth a sniff.
· Futher information: placelessness.com/current
