theatreVOICE

I still vibrate with anger when I remember a fellow critic, who shall remain nameless, spotting me enjoying an ice cream at a press night and pausing beside my seat to wag his finger in my face and admonish me with a single, patronising word: “Fattening!”

So I’ve been intrigued by the responses to Neil LaBute’s Fat Pig over the last few days – not least, the remark by one departing female spectator on the night I attended that it was “sooo embarrassing when the fat girl came on in a swimsuit”. It’s incredible, and not a little enraging, that society in general still seems to regard the display of appetite in women as inappropriate, ugly even. The fusing of two kinds of sensuality – the pleasure derived from food and from sexual connection – in LaBute’s play inevitably pushes buttons.

Interestingly – and again, frustratingly – some of the reviews seem to me to have betrayed a latent sexism. How could LaBute’s character, Helen, have allowed herself to get into such a lamentable state? Surely she knows women are supposed to be decorative, and that she’s ruining her chances of snagging a mate, so what’s with the self-sabotage? What deep psychological flaw underlies what most of the play’s other characters, and apparently some commentators, regard as her repellant layers of excess flesh? And why hasn’t Labute devoted more stage time to exploring it? Never mind that Helen seems a pretty well-adjusted individual with a frank enjoyment of food. Never mind that her spineless lover Tom’s inability to eat anything without scrutinising the label for the calorie content is more psychologically dysfunctional. Helen is a discomfiting anomaly, a woman who is frank about her pleasures.

I think the play is also about commodification, which warps natural human instincts and fetishises them. Tom and his creepy colleague Carter scrutinise air-brushed beauties in glossy men’s mags as if they were goods for the purchasing. Tom’s on-off girlfriend Jeannie sees herself as a product on the marriage market, almost past her sell-by date at 28. As a result she’s prepared to settle for Tom, even though she admits she doesn’t like him much, or if he won’t oblige for the vile Carter. Bodies are an investment; Jeannie talks about working on hers in Pilates. By contrast, when Helen speaks of “something we can work on” she’s talking about real emotional investment, about improving her and Tom’s relationship. About something, in other words, that she believes can genuinely make them both happier, rather than simply more saleable.

Then there’s the issue of masculinity – of the war films beloved of Helen and Tom that present an idealised, heroic image of manliness utterly absent from an environment where egos are so fragile, so anxious for peer approval, that men require their women to be physically flawless human handbags.

In the last lines of Nicholas De Jongh’s review, I felt I perceived a degree of guilt at having spent the evening laughing at a fat girl. “Fat Pig shows women being brought down… I find the process repellant and my own laughter shameful”, he writes. I’m by no means claiming that LaBute’s play, or indeed his production, are without their shortcomings. But I think if we look at the play more carefully, there’s no need for shame; the joke’s not on Helen.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 12:19 pm, by Sam Marlowe and is filed under Audio 2008. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.