How To Dine One Last Time At 'The Last Supper'

"Someone tried to open a coconut in the middle in the show, which was quite distracting."

Commissioned in 2002 by Time Festival Gent, The Last Supper has been touring around Europe and the UK since 2004, and has even been presented at Brisbane Festival and Carriageworks in Sydney. It’s Melbourne’s turn, The Last Supper now showing at NGV International’s Great Hall as part of the Ritual//Extinction chapter of Malthouse Theatre’s program. Wetherall explains its inception: “I had this image in my mind of a scene from The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover, and the lover is a librarian and he gets force-fed a book which kills him… And then Tim [Ingram, performer] said, just as I was thinking it, ‘We could use rice paper.’ Then completely out of the blue, another artist in the festival [came over] and said to us, ‘I’ve got this ream of paper which is all the last meals from prisoners who were on death row, Texas; would that be interesting to you?’ And I went, ‘Yeah!’ Honest to God, that was like a ten-minute conversation.”

Wetherell designed three tables that would accommodate 13 people each, to recreate the image of The Last Supper. While Wetherell insists the show isn’t a political statement about the death penalty (although he’d hoped it might spark conversation and has even been trying to get Amnesty International involved), he admits that The Last Supper tends to hold some weight with regard to that topic, as well as the themes of religion, mortality/immortality and fame.

After the show, Wetherell and his team chat to their audience and have found that the response is generally positive. “Quite a few people actually say that it often makes them consider what their last meal might be if they were in that situation. Someone tried to open a coconut in the middle in the show, which was quite distracting. Someone had to walk out once because they had a phobia of watching people eating apples — that was quite weird. [People] rarely touch the liver and onions… but then the last one we did in Belgium, someone came up to me and asked for the recipe! We did a version in Italy… you know they’re really into food in Italy [laughs], and almost every time food came out it was like, applause! Whenever we do the show, we tend to get offered two other gigs somewhere else in the world. We can’t stop doing it... So yeah, it has a life.”