Chewing the Fat

121329 original

Scottish audiences hoping to sneak an under-the-radar Fringe peek at Ford Kiernan and Greg Hemphill's behemoth live show, long since sold out at the SSE Hydro, are in for a shock. Taking Susie Orbach's Fat is a Feminist Issue as its launching pad, Chewing the Fat is a performance art piece examining one woman's 21st century body issues.

But this isn't a dry academic study, nor is it a feminist, even quasi-feminist, polemic. Instead, it's a fun, breezy and occasionally dark story of 24-year-old Selina Thompson's own battles with binge eating, weight loss and attitudes to beauty and food. She is a woman who no longer wants to apologise or excuse herself for how she looks. She is fat, and that's okay. In fact, she is beautiful.

There is an interesting tension here between Thompson's drive on the one hand to find acceptance and beauty in her size and the evident disgust she displays towards her binge eating. Among the most poignant moments of the show sees Thompson kneeling on all fours, stuffing roast chicken into her mouth, a surgical mask covering her face. The effect is to create an image of bovine grazing, an animalistic picture of a woman, feedbag on her face, chewing the meaty cud and seeming barely human. It is a quite horrifying picture, but a powerful one.

There is no grand or profound lesson to be found here, aside from a general conclusion that food is used to fill a void left unfulfilled by other areas of her life, but the hour is easily carried on the broad back of Thompson's considerable charm.