Jaded theatre-goers may break into a cold sweat at the prospect of a play devised and performed by London teenagers, for fear of being jumped by some horribly worthy knife-crime drama.
But the driving force of ‘Fat Girl…’ is Mark Storor – the artist behind the Unicorn’s astonishingly moving dialysis drama for children, ‘For the Best’ – so it was never likely to be plagued by cliché.
With his cast of 11 young people, aided by Jules Maxwell’s glacially expansive, neo-classical score, and Babis Alexiadis’s plaintive animations, Storor has created something truly beautiful and strange.
Abstract, icy and near wordless, the 12-part ‘Fat Girl…’ explores the transition from childhood to adulthood. Instead of a plot, there are recurring motifs. In three scenes, boys undergo forms of baptism: in ketchup; in shaving foam and, in one of the play’s most melancholic yet lovely moments, a boy dressed in a paper clown’s outfit is dunked in a moonlit pool of tears.
Images of passage and the end of youth are everywhere: in a pastoral early section entitled ‘Swallow 1’, two girls marvel at a bright spring morning, capturing a bird out of innocent curiosity. In ‘Swallow 2’, they dreamily shred and devour the caged creature.
I can’t in all honesty say I saw much of my own teenhood in these aloof, ethereal beings’ voyage from innocence to experience. But it took two years or Storor to get his charges to this point. And, crucially, the few spoken word sections do thaw the frostiness. There’s light relief as a Muslim boy speaks of the temptations of bacon whilst dancing an ungainly pas de deux with a walking hog. And, at the end, a girl talks us through photos of her late mother, the whole room quivering with the tremble in her voice. All sorrow is earthed at the play’s climax, as both teens and the older musicians charge about the room in one joyous circle, unbroken.
Other, less abstract plays about adolescence will touch more people more deeply, but few will possess the wintry luminescence of ‘Fat Girl…’. Gorgeous stuff, and a very welcome return to experimental roots for the Roundhouse.