Whale | Fringe World | Season ended | ★ ★ ★
The joy of Fringe World as an un-curated festival is that there are so many opportunities to take risks. Sometimes this is for the audience, who can take in improvisational dance performed to experimental music before checking out burlesque cabaret.
Other times these risks are the ones taken by theatre companies who are putting out brand new work into the world. These baby shows are often the first iterations of what they will grow into. This is the case with Whale, a one-woman-show about living in a fat body from Crash Theatre Company.
Borrowing from the bible of one woman shows (I am, of course, referring to Fleabag) Courtney weaves her monologue through snippets of a conversation with a disembodied male voice, in this case a GP. This was the first of many relatable moments in the show as she is told that in order to fix her problems she needs to ‘get her eating under control’.
As the show continues Courtney shares her formative experiences of living in her fat body and the way she is treated by others – mainly men – because of how she looks. While these anecdotes become a little repetitive there are some lovely lines in here including a very Catholic allusion to carbohydrates as communion which has stayed with me, rattling around in my brain since Tuesday night.
The resolution in which Courtney becomes comfortable with her body is whiplash fast and seems to be the sole result of getting a girlfriend. I am here for the queer joy of this, but what is overlooked is that she is still seeing and appreciating her body through the gaze of another person.
There’s very little in the narrative arc of the show to suggest character development prior to the guardian angel of TikTok arriving to inform her she is, in fact, a lesbian and not just a really great ally. Instead we are presented with queerness as a remedy for fatphobia and poor body image. This is at best a simplistic conclusion given the recent announcement of a campaign by the Butterfly Foundation to address the increase in eating disorders in the LGBTQI+ community.
Ultimately Whale is a chubby little toddler wobbling around on uncertain legs. I would love to see this work again after judicious editing and some considered dramaturgy to create moments of emotional tension and release over the course of the hour long performance.
The joy I felt at seeing other fat women in the audience, our shared nods of recognition at Courtney’s story is proof that this risky infant of a show has the potential to grow into a Lizzo worthy celebration of learning to love life in a fat body.
Bec Bowman
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