The Size Zero Debate. It makes a good headline. Those eye-catching Zs, the hissing sibilance, the obligatory picture of the underage model with her jutting clavicles and shrunken wrists. Once again we are in the throes of the twice yearly carnival of international catwalk shows which, since the death of anorexic model Luisel Ramos two years ago, have been plagued by the sibilant spectre of Size Zero. The models are now under as much scrutiny as the couture and any designer who books a coterie of skeletal teenagers is vilified in the press for their complicit role in promoting, if not glorifying, anorexia nervosa. Madrid caved to pressure and imposed a ban on underweight models but the major players: New York, Paris and Milan continue to venerate the x-ray figure and deny the existence of breasts, hips, flesh, all the trappings of a womanly body.
And now theatre land has weighed in on the debate (if you’ll excuse the pun.) Neil LaBute, the playwright perennially dubbed ‘cuddly’ by interviewers, has given us Fat Pig, a heavy handed attack on the cult of Size Zero and neurotic dieting. The play opened in March and the provocative subject matter and media-friendly cast ensured comprehensive coverage in the Sunday broadsheets. Fat Pig was trumpeted as a savage polemic on our narcissistic culture.
The title is contentious, the premise slight. Tom (Robert Webb,) who is thin, falls in love with Helen (Ella Smith) who is not. She is the Rubenesque, fleshy bottomed, plump-cheeked heroine of the piece; the eponymous fat pig in the eyes of Tom’s obnoxious workmate Carter (Kris Marshall.) Jeannie (Joanna Page) is Tom’s skinny, neurotic ex who opposes the match. LaBute’s characters are meanly drawn: the three thin characters are monsters: self-obsessed, inconsiderate and consumed by the New York cult of mineral supplements, gyms and alfalfa sprouts. Buxom Helen is warm, funny, kind and self-sacrificing. It’s a fairy story turned topsy-turvy where the ugly stepsisters are good by dint of being ugly while Cinderella is a bitch because she is thin.
Robert Webb is a suitably confused Tom, both smitten with and ashamed of Helen, but he falls too often into the truculent, adolescent mannerisms of his alter ego Jeremy of Peep Show, a character he has been playing for too long. Kris Marshall does a convincing New York drawl and is suitably viper-like, a villain in a Calvin Klein suit, flashing predatory grins and casting critical eyes over skinny Jeannie’s backside. Joanna Page as Jeannie is neurotic, demanding and wholly unsympathetic with an accent that is American by way of Cardiff, South Africa and possibly Bratislava. Her accent is so peripatetic as to be distracting and at its worst, incomprehensible. The dialogue is sub-sitcom pilot, relying on coarse fat jokes (obesity as the last refuge of the politically incorrect scoundrel) and clunking, implausible exchanges.
In the final scenes we hope for redemption, lessons learnt, and chocolate cake with double cream for all, but the play ends with a bathetic display of moral cowardice that is both unsatisfying and lazy. Fat Pig is too childish in its morals to be a true attack on the modern malaise: fat equals good, thin equals bad, there is no happy medium. Worse, the play is guilty of complicity in the cult of the body beautiful it aims to attack, with its cast of photogenic TV stars, ill-suited to their roles and unable to command a West End stage. The cast take their bows in swimwear; Helen shrouded in a sarong so as not to offend delicate sensibilities. The relative nobody Ella Smith is superb; the others are just dead weight.
This article first appeared in TCS
