Tamzin is currently starring in a play at her school, Cigarettes and Chocolate, as Gemma, the protagonist. You can read the entire article at the Cambridge’s Varsity Online.

Tamzin Merchant was a fragile and fierce Gemma, whose silence seemed continuously precarious, and yet in her theft of the show, other actors were exposed to falter. There was a certain desperation in their creation of self-absorbed stereotypes, each wildly different in the endeavor for a different reaction to be elicited from Gemma’s silence. Lines were often splurged out erratically; I wasn’t persuaded that they hadn’t just spent a couple months learning how to recite at high speed. Perhaps it was a nod to the value of the things that are left unsaid in human contact, but my impression was that they all needed to relax into their roles, and shake off the visible awareness that they were giving a performance in a play sceptical of speech. Only “rich and pregnant” silences, we are told, pierce through modern society’s excessive verbiage, and it was in such silences upon stage that the magic of this production emerged.

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