Mess

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“This is not the real version of the play,” Josephine and Boris repeatedly insist. But this show is about as real as they come, with the painstaking neuroses plaguing an anorexic twentysomething played out in excruciating detail. Repeatedly breaking the fourth wall to inform the audience that they are performing a scaled down version of the show, one that will include zip wires and a revolving stage when they get to London, this production is sublime in its simplicity.

The premise of Mess is a play within a play: neurotic Josephine (Caroline Horton, named The Stage’s Best Solo Performer in 2010) enlists the help of friends Boris and Sistahl in a bid to bring her traumatic, anorexic years to a public forum. There is one extra layer, though, as in reality, Mess is Horton’s own autobiography of a disorder that notoriously trades on secrecy. The poignancy with which she recounts each objectively mundane, but subjectively devastating, detail about a prized colour-coordinated calorie chart, or her struggle to eat an apple, comes from a place of heartbreaking honesty.

An eating disorder may sound like a curious source for comedy, but there are many light moments during the piece which are remarkably self-aware: glimpses of rationality in Josephine’s erratic behaviour where she recognises an opportunity, a necessity, for laughs. But this never detracts from the startling sincerity of the piece, centred round an issue that affects so many, yet is voiced by so few.